LES wrote:> ...electrical engineering was largely an art in the 50s and 60s...You mean 1850s and 1860s, right?

How much method overloading is a good thing? How much is just bewildering?

Microsoft has recently purchased Connectix so it will be interesting to see how they maintain VPC on the Mac. I believe they have grand plans to leverage VPC to claim cross platform nirvana.Or did they just buy it in order to squelch it?I wonder how well Longhorn (the next generation of Windows), with its new database-based (SQL Server 2003?)...

It cannot be done. You are about 4 bits short.American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a standard coding of 7-bit numeric codes to characters.2^(7*4) = 2^28 = 0x10000000 = 268435456 decimal, which is much less than 2174000000 (or 0x81949B80 in hex), so you are out of luck. In other words, to get the range you want, you'll...

Hmm, I don't see the irony (maybe Alanis Morissette would, though).Is the argument here that XML files are "documents" whereas other (possibly more legible) files are not?Wouldn't it be better to have a crisp and clear build-file syntax which was much more tailored to a build process that could also generate an XML file output?

You shouldn't be working in the com\bruceeckel\simpletest sub-directory. That directory should only contain modules which are in the com.bruceeckel.simpletest package, which you are not building. Instead, the java files you create should be in the c:\code directory and you should compile them there.The reason what you are doing doesn't work as...

Add a line to your autoexec.bat that looks like this:set classpath=c:\code;.You can type that on the command line of your DOS box, too, so you don't have to reboot (but after you reboot, it will no longer be necessary to type it in the future).Let's see your main() method in the Assignment class. If it isn't defined correctly, that could be the...

Don't feel too bad. I think this is a stupid mistake of the Java compiler that it can't give helpful messages for the most common errors people make, instead of cryptic messages that just frustrate and confound beginners. It is pretty silly that javac requires that the file be specified with the ".java" and java requires that the class not have...

Looks like you are mixing cases between file name and class name; you should either fastidiously use "Assignment" or always use "assignment," but not whimsically use both.

> It is not necessary to try and quantify how many> bugs are caused by the lack-of type-checking for> three reasons:> > 1. It may not matter based on the type of application> or system your are building.Huh?> 2. The answer is greater than 0.I disagree. It has to be enough to justify the drawbacks. If you are going to write an program with 1000...

Thanks for posting the links, Paul Graham's article was a good read (I haven't gotten to the other one yet).An interesting side-effect of creating the "hundred-year language" today is that then it wouldn't be the hundred year language any more.I vaguely remember some science fiction movie (maybe it was an episode or movie of Star Trek with Data...

> Having looked at Python several times, the lack of runtime> type checking has always been a show-stopper. All> developers who have been in the business awhile know how> difficult it is to develop robust, error-free code so the> sooner bugs are caught the better. This idea of "wait> until runtime" to catch errors is unacceptable. The rule> of...

> Hope somebody could make a top ten list about why runtime> type checking is GOOD(or not that BAD).I don't know about a top ten list, but when I first started learning Python, I was concerned about this issue, as well. The thing you learn as you begin to use it more, is that it is really a non-issue. Later, when using Java or C#, you realize...

> I missed one point in the discussion about runtime vs.> compiletime> type-checking and that is the self-documenting effect when> I explicitly specify the types I use.> > I think this is much more communicating:> > > public Configuration getConfiguration(File file) throws> IOException> Hmm... looks kind of redundant to me... Also, to increase...

Hi Stephen,I had this same belief and wrote some tests to see how Vector and ArrayList stacked up. They were very close, but to my surprise, Vector came out faster. Of course, these were pretty simple tests and completely lacking in scientific vigor, I'm sure. I wonder if there are some more rigorous benchmarks posted somewhere that would...