Re: static hashtable with conent?
Mike Schilling wrote:
I think, though I'm not going to insist upon this (not being in a position
to do so, even were I so inclined to; Usenet, as a free medium, somewhat
paradoxically places fewer demands on the reader than a paid one does.
Having no money invested in the reading of a post leaves the reader free to
quit it at a moment's notice for any reason at all with no sense of having
lost any investment. This places a substantial burden on an author who
desires a wide audience to avoid being either dull or unpleasant. and
certainly to avoid unreasonable demands), that Patricia, whose general good
sense is, I should think, well established in these parts, at least to the
extent that a history of posts can be said to establish a picture of their
author (this being another subject which is open to debate: certainly, the
amount of time that, for instance, sarcasm goes undetected, argues that
Usenet posts are a very imperfect vehicle for communicating the sort of
subtleties by which people, in the common world of face-to-face
communication, use to form opinions of their fellows), has the right of it
here; that while the grammars that underlie both natural languages like
English and artificial languages like Java are capable of forming expression
and statements (and here we are lucky that both terms, while not synonymous
in the two realms, in this case can be used as if they were) of arbitrarily
high complexity, simply by applying the generation rules repeatedly, that in
both cases the idioms which are understood easily and naturally come from a
constrained application of those rules, and that using examples lying
outside the standard idioms places upon our readers, whose ready
understanding is in fact in our own interests as well as in theirs, an
unnecessary burden, and thus should be avoided or at least severely
minimized, absent any significant advantage to be found in their use.
Pure brilliance. Bravo!
As I stated before, I, at least, have acknowledged the validity of Patricia's
argument in favor of clarity over cleverness.
To a point. I doubt very much that I will be afraid to use anonymous classes;
they are occasionally a necessary idiom. In some rare cases, although it has
yet to be necessary for any program I've worked on, I can imagine needing to
define an anonymous class constructor.
I am not arguing for obscurity for obscurity's sake, nor for cleverness for
cleverness's sake. It's just that in Java the anonymous class idiom is the
heart of certain closure-like expressions. If an anonymous class is the
cleanest way to accomplish such a pseudo-closure, I am going to use it, and I
will expect competent Java programmers to understand it. If I were hiring a
Java programmer, I would test them on their ability to understand anonymous
classes as part of the screening process.
OTOH, I have read at least one assertion that nested classes represent a
security hole in Java code. I am skeptical of that claim, but it's out there.
--
Lew