In addition to JVM support for "dynamic languages",
there are also library changes that would be helpful
for non-Java languages. Off the top of my head:
(1) Java doesn't doesn't support "string as a sequence of
Unicode scalar value" very well. And this is mandated
by some recent languages, including Scheme R6RS, and
XQuery/XSLT/XPath. The problem of course is surrogate
pairs: You can't do O(1) indexing using either String
or StringBuffer/StringBuilder or char[]. For a language
where strings are immutable, for example XQuery/XSLT/XPath
or for that matter JavaFX, it would be natural to use
java.lang.String, but that means either using linear
scanning to get the N'th character, or nor using java.lang.String,
or using different representations depending on whether a string
contains surrogate characters, all of which are ugly. At the
very least, if a String had a flag indicating whether it had
surrogate characters, then we could index in the normal case,
and only do linear scan in the rare cases.
(2) Numeric types, including supporting unlimited-precision integers
in an efficient way. We've touched on this before.
Is this sort of thing within the charter of JSR 292?
Or is there some other place to work on / lobby for these things?
--
--Per Bothner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://per.bothner.com/
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