[Mono-list] Wheen someone asks about java...

[Tom]

> Just found this article about the reality of Java's
> language neutrality.
> It does not point to any technical reason why
> language neutrality is not
> possible in java, but rather attempts to analyseS
> real-world
> non-java-the-language java bytecode compiler
> implementations.

Sessions's research can only be described as shoddy,
since he missed several major, mature, and widely used
languages with JVM backends.

In any case, a more serious flaw with Sessions's
analysis is the implicit assumption that CLR is any
better.  CLR has a few more bytecodes, but neither
its object model nor its execution model are
significantly different from the JVM.  There is no
support for actors, nondeterminism, metaobjects, 
(non-OO) polymorphism, categories, logical variables,
efficient functional data structures, or a host
of other features many modern languages use.

CLR is only language independent if the set of
languages you know is limited to languages like
C, C++, Java, VB, Perl, Python, and C#.  That may
be good enough for the market, but the JVM covers
roughly the same space.

Tom.



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