Re: bindings and assignments (was: Re: continuations)

[James McCartney <address@hidden>]

On Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 10:41 AM, Guy Steele - Sun 
Microsystems Labs wrote:

> Actually, the prototype implementation *did* allow non-final
> variables to be referenced from within inner classes.  There was
> an outcry from *users*, complaining that they did not want this!
> The reason was interesting: in order to support such variables,
> it was necessary to heap-allocate them, and (at that time, at least)
> the average Java programmer was still pretty skittish about heap
> allocation and garbage collection and all that.  They disapproved
> of the language performing heap allocation "under the table" when
> there was no occurrence of the "new" keyword in sight.

I find this very ironic. It is too bad that programmers who do not use 
Java *because* it doesn't have closures were not asked about this 
issue, instead of those programmers who were already willing to make 
such a compromise. This decision insured that this potential new 
audience's desires will not be met.

-- 
--- james mccartney


-- 
--- james mccartney   james@audiosynth.com   <http://www.audiosynth.com>
SuperCollider - a real time audio synthesis programming language for 
MacOS X.