Has anyone ever talked about porting the entire SA to java.
Nope, that's new to me. And I for one can't see that the benefits would be very significant, except to windows users. Certainly not enough to outweigh the effort.
I think it would make it more easily installed and run on multiple platforms, especially Windows.
The latter half (re: windows) is true, the latter half is debatable. I've seen more unix boxes with perl support than java support..
Not to mention the source code would probably be a lot more readable. As you can tell, I'm a Perl novice. I'm a pretty advanced java and Delphi programmer. I can program and read C++ and C, but I don't do it a lot so I'm not as good. I'm learning C# which it pretty much the same as java. I've also programmed in many other scripting languages. I have to say, that reading Perl code is probably the most difficult code to understand, excluding assembly language. I give you Perl guys a lot of credit. I'm not sure I could ever efficiently write a full Perl application. The code is so strange looking.
I thin the "code would probably be a lot more readable" is a very subjective thing. I know a smidge of perl, and am a excellent C and C++.. I find Java extraordinarily weird and tough to read, as I don't know the language.
And, lets face it, the sa-devel team is for the most part perl programmers.. I'm sure several know java, but I'd be surprised if they were all as good at java as they are at perl. So, in doing a port, you'd need a new devel team.
