Java Reference
In-Depth Information
develop their languages. To ensure an unbiased evaluation, the languages received
code names: Red (by Intermetrics), Green (by CII Honeywell Bull), Blue (by
Softech), and Yellow (by SRI International). All four languages were based on
Pascal. The Green language emerged as the winner in 1979. It was named Ada in
honor of the world's first programmer, Ada Lovelace (see
Random Fact 14.1
).
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The Ada language was roundly derided by academics as a typical bloated Defense
Department product. Military contractors routinely sought, and obtained,
exemptions from the requirement that they had to use Ada on their projects.
Outside the defense industry, few companies used Ada. Perhaps that is unfair. Ada
had been designed to be complex enough to be useful for many applications,
whereas other, more popular languages, notably C++, have grown to be just as
complex and ended up being unmanageable.
The initial version of the C language was designed around 1972. Unlike Ada, C is
a simple language that lets you program Ȓclose to the machineȓ. It is also quite
unsafe. Because different compiler writers added different features, the language
actually sprouted various dialects. Some programming instructions were
understood by one compiler but rejected by another. Such divergence is an
immense pain to a programmer who wants to move code from one computer to
another, and an effort got underway to iron out the differences and come up with a
standard version of C. The design process ended in 1989 with the completion of
the ANSI (American National Standards Institute) Standard. In the meantime,
Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T added features of the language Simula (an
object-oriented language designed for carrying out simulations) to C. The resulting
language was called C++. From 1985 until today, C++ has grown by the addition
of many features, and a standardization process was completed in 1998. C++ has
been enormously popular because programmers can take their existing C code and
move it to C++ with only minimal changes. In order to keep compatibility with
existing code, every innovation in C++ had to work around the existing language
constructs, yielding a language that is powerful but somewhat cumbersome to use.
In 1995, Java was designed to be conceptually simpler and more internally
consistent than C++, while retaining the syntax that is familiar to millions of C and
C++ programmers. The Java language was a great design success. It is indeed
clean and simple. As for the Java library, you know from your own experience that
it is neither.
