David Simmons wrote:
> Here is an interesting URL cited from the objective-c newsgroup relating to
> "Patrick Naughton", one of the authors of Java, and what he has to say on
> Java's origins in relation to Smalltalk, etc.
>
>
http://WWW.CS.UMD.edu/users/seanl/stuff/java-objc.htmlI Read the cited URL reference. Interesting. While the author, along with
Dr. Gosling,
were most influenced by Smalltalk, Simula, and Objective C, the resulting
product
reflects a wider understanding of programming languages. The fact that they
quite
deliberately eschewed many of the more brittle aspects of C++ speaks well for
their
language design. Also, someone suggested Modula-3 as a precursor. Whether
that
model had any influence is difficult to say. What is interesting, to many of
my colleagues,
is the amazing semantic correspondence to Ada 95. Syntactically, Java
continues
to reflect the influence of C, including a few of C's worst features. Many
other ideas
map nicely to Ada.
The designer of Ada 95, Tucker Taft, has taken advantage of this similarity and
produced
a compiler that directly compiles Ada source code into Java bytecode. While
he was
at it, he translated the Java libraries into Ada. Also, Ada has a defined
language interface
protocol that makes it easy to create interfaces to Java, as well as C, C++,
COBOL, Fortran,
and other languages as necessary. Consequently, there are now a couple of
popular compiler
products in the Ada community that allow an Ada programmer to create Java
applets
directly from Ada without the need to learn or use Java the language.
The real contribution of Java, it seems, is not the language, although that is
an OK result. Rather,
the contribution of Java is the resurrection of the idea of P-Code in a
workable form that can
make it possible for other languages to directly compile intermediate code that
runs in a portable
environment. Those of us who prefer to code in Ada are quite pleased with
that result.
Richard Riehle
Locked
