Re: Java blunders
On Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:14:34 -0400, Eric Sosman wrote:
I'll also take issue with your use of "semi-supported:" Can you
find a Java implementation anywhere, even one implementation, on which
these operations are *not* supported as described in the JLS?
I interpreted that as meaning that the capability exists in the language
to do bitwise work with bytes, but that no particular effort was made to
facilitate this, and it was allowed to get quite warty, suggesting that
it's "supported" at the "it's technically possible" level but not at the
"they cared about making this non-horrible to do, or even thought much
about it specifically" level.
IMHO Java would be a better language if `switch' were removed
altogether, fall-through or not. But that's just MHO, which (clearly)
is not widely shared. Meanwhile, I oppose anything that encourages the
use of the construct.
If Java existed in a vacuum, so one could always use polymorphism instead
of "switch", then maybe. But Java does not exist in a vacuum and at the
edge it will often be necessary to take a finite set of numbers, strings,
or something such as a png compression-type magic number, an enum-like
field from a database, or similar and react to that. And that is a place
where switch is useful and polymorphism isn't. Switch can even be used to
turn "which value was received" to "which class to instantiate" so you
can use polymorphism in the rest of the code.
switch (compression-ID) {
case C_DEFLATE:
comp = new Deflater(<get some params from file header>);
break;
case C_ZLIB:
comp = new ZLib(<get some other params from file header>);
break;
...
}
return decodeRest(bulkOffset, comp, yadda yadda yadda);
....
rawData = comp.decompress(myByteBuffer);