Women in Technology

Article:		10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0
Subject:		Primitive types are needed!
Date:		2002-08-02 10:12:15
From:		petilon
For efficiency we still need primitive types. The article mentions C#, but the much-vaunted "Type System Unification" in C# is broken. See http://www.geocities.com/csharpfaq/box.html Other poor ideas in C# include structs and properties. See critiques section on this site: http://www.geocities.com/csharpfaq/

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Primitive types are needed, but need not prohibit first-class types
  2002-08-06 05:27:23  David Collier-Brown | [View]
  
  
  Actually smalltalk used a simple mechanism
  to make operations fast: they started out
  running the "primitive" code (ie, machine
  code), but if it could not handle one of
  the cases, faulted into a more general
  interpreted code-block.
  
  This made the common case fast, without blowing
  up the general case.
  
  Java, in principle, could have first-class
  types with full generality, without sacrificing
  performance if the "int" primitive code
  was the first code run for all integer
  operations, and had a few hooks to the full
  class, to be used whenever the primitive code
  didn't suffice.