Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: phinely@Hawaii.Edu (Peter Hinely)
Subject: Re: Is this News Group Alive?
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References: <DERWAY.96Apr15154133@alumnae.ndc.com> <4kuq7r$hs9@samba.rahul.net>
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 18:17:54 GMT
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In article <4kuq7r$hs9@samba.rahul.net>, RjB  <onomoto@rahul.net> wrote:
>In article <DERWAY.96Apr15154133@alumnae.ndc.com>,
>D. Erway <derway@ndc.com> wrote:
>>
>>Haven't seen anything here for a couple of weeks.  Are people giving up?
>>
>
>	Waiting for Harlequin's Dylan product for Win95/NT.  Waiting
>to get my hands dirty!
>

I think that the ball is in Harlequin's court now (since Apple has dropped
the ball and CMU's Gwydion is still quite awhile away.)  I wish the folks
at Harlequin would give us a status report on DylanWorks. 

Dylan needs to be marketed much better, which probably means making a 
net-enabled version.  I don't know if it would be possible to create a 
compiler that can compile Dylan into Java byte codes.  Java is missing a 
lot of language features that Dylan supports.

IMHO, Java seems like a toy language compared to Dylan.  Java has 
tremendous momentum behind it already, though, mainly because of its 
association with the world wide web.  The java newsgroups gets several 
hundred messages a day, and development tools/compiler companies are 
rushing to get their Java products out.  The best technology rarely wins, 
so it's important for Dylan to be marketed well, if it is going to make 
any impact at all.

Java has no keyword argument support, no support for variable length 
argument lists, no macro system, no multiple inheritance (though it does 
have multiple interfaces), classes and functions are not objects, and the 
list goes on.

Java's built-in collection types are quite limited at this time.  The 
array collection type is built into the language.  Ex:

char[] buffer = new char[500];

for(int i = 0; i < buffer.lenth; i++)
  {
  // do some code
  }

The other two collection types that are defined are a vector and a 
hashtable (java.util.Hashtable, java.util.Vector).  To iterate through 
them, you call a method of the object which returns an enumeration 
(iterator) object (java.util.Enumeration).  The enumeration object has 
two public instance methods:  Enumeration.hasMoreElements() and 
Enumeration.nextElement() which you can use in a "for" loop to iterate 
through the collection.




