The Java Language Specification (Java Series) - Softcover

Joy, Bill; Steele, Guy; Bracha, Gilad; Gosling,

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201310082 ISBN 13: 9780201310085

Publisher: Addison-Wesley (Sd), 2000

Synopsis

Written by the inventors of the technology, The Java(tm) Language Specification, Second Edition is the definitive technical reference for the Java(tm) programming language. If you want to know the precise meaning of the language's constructs, this is the source for you. The book provides complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the syntax and semantics of the Java programming language. It describes all aspects of the language, including the semantics of all types, statements, and expressions, as well as threads and binary compatibility

About this title

About the Author

Bill Joy is founder and Vice President of Research at Sun Microsystems, where he has led the company's technical strategy, working on both hardware and software architecture. He is well known as the creator of the Berkeley version of the UNIX operating system, for which he received a lifetime achievement award from the USENIX Association in 1993. He received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1986. Joy has had a central role in shaping the Java language. Guy L. Steele Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he is responsible for the specification of the Java programming language as well as research in parallel algorithms. He is well known as the co-creator of the Scheme programming language and for his reference books for the C programming language (with Samuel Harbison) and for the Common Lisp programming language. Steele received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1988 and was named an ACM Fellow in 1994.

Gilad Bracha is Computational Theologist at Sun Microsystems, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk™, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

James Gosling is a Fellow and Vice President at Sun Microsystems, the creator of the Java programming language, and one of the computer industry's most noted programmers. He is the 1996 recipient of Software Development's "Programming Excellence Award." He previously developed NeWS, Sun's network-extensible window system, and was a principal in the Andrew project at Carnegie-Mellon University, from which he holds a PhD in Computer Science. 0201310082AB05312002

From the Back Cover

Written by the inventors of the technology, The Java™ Language Specification, Second Edition is the definitive technical reference for the Java™ programming language. If you want to know the precise meaning of the language's constructs, this is the source for you.

The book provides complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the syntax and semantics of the Java programming language. It describes all aspects of the language, including the semantics of all types, statements, and expressions, as well as threads and binary compatibility.

0201310082B04062001

From the Inside Flap

The Java™ programming language was originally called Oak, and was designed for use in embedded consumer-electronic applications by James Gosling. After several years of experience with the language, and significant contributions by Ed Frank, Patrick Naughton, Jonathan Payne, and Chris Warth it was retargeted to the Internet, renamed, and substantially revised to be the language specified here. The final form of the language was defined by James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Richard Tuck, Frank Yellin, and Arthur van Hoff, with help from Graham Hamil ton, Tim Lindholm, and many other friends and colleagues.

The Java programming language is a general-purpose concurrent class-based object-oriented programming language, specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It allows application developers to write a program once and then be able to run it everywhere on the Internet. This book attempts a complete specification of the syntax and semantics of the language. We intend that the behavior of every language construct is specified here, so that all implementations will accept the same programs. Except for timing dependencies or other non-determinisms and given sufficient time and sufficient memory space, a program written in the Java programming language should com pute the same result on all machines and in all implementations.

We believe that the Java programming language is a mature language, ready for widespread use. Nevertheless, we expect some evolution of the language in the years to come. We intend to manage this evolution in a way that is completely compatible with existing applications. To do this, we intend to make relatively few new versions of the language, and to distinguish each new version with a different filename extension. Compilers and systems will be able to support the several ver sions simultannously, with complete compatibility.

Much research and experimentation with the Java platform is already under way. We encourage this work, and will continue to cooperate with external groups to explore improvements to the language and platform. For example, we have already received several interesting proposals for parameterized types. In techni cally difficult areas, near the state of the art, this kind of research collaboration is essential.

We acknowledge and thank the many people who have contributed to this book through their excellent feedback, assistance and encouragement: Particularly thorough, careful, and thoughtful reviews of drafts were provided by Tom Cargill, Peter Deutsch, Paul Hilfinger, Masayuki Ida, David Moon, Steven Muchnick, Charles L. Perkins, Chris Van Wyk, Steve Vinoski, Philip Wadler, Daniel Weinreb, and Kenneth Zadeck. We are very grateful for their extraordinary volunteer efforts.

We are also grateful for reviews, questions, comments, and suggestions from Stephen Adams, Bowen Alpern, Glenn Ammons, Leonid Arbuzov, Kim Bruce, Edwin Chan, David Chase, Pavel Curtis, Drew Dean, William Dietz, David Dill, Patrick Dussud, Ed Felten, John Giannandrea, John Gilmore, Charles Gust, Warren Harris, Lee Hasiuk, Mike Hendrickson, Mark Hill, Urs Hoelzle, Roger Hoover, Susan Flynn Hummel, Christopher Jang, Mick Jordan, Mukesh Kacker, Peter Kessler, James Larus, Derek Lieber, Bill McKeeman, Steve Naroff, Evi Nemeth, Robert O'Callahan, Dave Papay, Craig Partridge, Scott Pfeffer, Eric Raymond, Jim Roskind, Jim Russell, William Scherlis, Edith Schonberg, Anthony Scian, Matthew Self, Janice Shepherd, Kathy Stark, Barbara Steele, Rob Strom, William Waite, Greg Weeks, and Bob Wilson. (This list was generated semi-automatically from our E-mail records. We apologize if we have omitted anyone.)

The feedback from all these reviewers was invaluable to us in improving the definition of the language as well as the form of the presentation in this book. We thank them for their diligence. Any remaining errors in this book---we hope they are few---are our responsibility and not theirs.

We thank Francesca Freedman and Doug Kramer for assistance with matters of typography and layout. We thank Dan Mills of Adobe Systems Incorporated for assistance in exploring possible choices of typefaces.

Many of our colleagues at Sun Microsystems have helped us in one way or another. Lisa Friendly, our series editor, managed our relationship with Addison Wesley. Susan Stambaugh managed the distribution of many hundreds of copies of drafts to reviewers. We received valuable assistance and technical advice from Ben Adida, Ole Agesen, Ken Arnold, Rick Cattell, Asmus Freytag, Norm Hardy, Steve Heller, David Hough, Doug Kramer, Nancy Lee, Marianne Mueller, Akira Tanaka, Greg Tarsy, David Ungar, Jim Waldo, Ann Wollrath, Geoff Wyant, and Derek White. We thank Alan Baratz, David Bowen, Mike Clary, John Doerr, Jon Kannegaard, Eric Schmidt, Bob Sproull, Bert Sutherland, and Scott McNealy for leadership and encouragement.

The on-line Bartleby Library of Columbia University, at URL: cc.columbia/acis/bartleby/ was invaluable to us during the process of researching and verifying many of the quotations that are scattered throughout this book. Here is one example: They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.
---Robert Burton (1576--1640) We are grateful to those who have toiled on Project Bartleby, for saving us a great deal of effort and reawakening our appreciation for the works of Walt Whitman.

We are thankful for the tools and services we had at our disposal in writing this book: telephones, overnight delivery, desktop workstations, laser printers, photocopiers, text formatting and page layout software, fonts, electronic mail, the World Wide Web, and, of course, the Internet. We live in three different states, scattered across a continent, but collaboration with each other and with our reviewers has seemed almost effortless. Kudos to the thousands of people who have worked over the years to make these excellent tools and services work quickly and reliably.

Mike Hendrickson, Katie Duffy, Simone Payment, and Rosa Aim"e GonzSumlez of Addison-Wesley were very helpful, encouraging, and patient during the long process of bringing this book to print. We also thank the copy editors. Rosemary Simpson worked hard, on a very tight schedule, to create the index. We got into the act at the last minute, however; blame us and not her for any jokes you may find hidden therein. Finally, we are grateful to our families and friends for their love and support during this last, crazy, year. In their book The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie said that they felt that the C language "wears well as one's experience with it grows." If you like C, we think you will like the Java programming language.

We hope that it, too, wears well for you.

James Gosling--Cupertino, California
Bill Joy--Aspen, Colorado
Guy Steele--Chelmsford, Massachusetts
July, 1996

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface Over the past few years, the Java(tm) programming language has enjoyed unprecedented success. This success has brought a challenge: along with explo sive growth in popularity, there has been explosive growth in the demands made on the language and its libraries. To meet this challenge, the language has grown as well (fortunately, not explosively) and so have the libraries. This second edition of The Java(tm) Language Specification reflects these devel opments. It integrates all the changes made to the Java programming language since the publication of the first edition in 1996. The bulk of these changes were made in the 1.1 release of the Java platform in 1997, and revolve around the addi tion of nested type declarations. Later modifications pertained to floatingpoint operations. In addition, this edition incorporates important clarifications and amendments involving method lookup and binary compatibility. This specification defines the language as it exists today. The Java program ming language is likely to continue to evolve. At this writing, there are ongoing initiatives through the Java Community Process to extend the language with generic types and assertions, refine the memory model, etc. However, it would be inappropriate to delay the publication of the second edition until these efforts are concluded. The specifications of the libraries are now far too large to fit into this volume, and they continue to evolve. Consequently, API specifications have been removed from this book. The library specifications can be found on the java.sun.com Web site (see below); this specification now concentrates solely on the Java programming language proper. Readers may send comments on this specification to: jls@java.sun.com. To learn the latest about the Java 2 platform, or to download the latest Java 2 SDK release, visit http://java.sun.com. Updated information about the Java Series, including errata for The Java(tm) Language Specification, and pre views of forthcoming books, may be found at http://java.sun.com/Series. Many people contributed to this book, directly and indirectly. Tim Lindholm brought extraordinary dedication to his role as technical editor. He also made invaluable technical contributions, especially on floatingpoint issues. The book would likely not see the light of day without him. Lisa Friendly, the Series editor, provided encouragement and advice for which I am very thankful. David Bowen first suggested that I get involved in the specifications of the Java platform. I am grateful to him for introducing me to this uncommonly rich area. John Rose, the father of nested types in the Java programming language, has been unfailingly gracious and supportive of my attempts to specify them accu rately. Many people have provided valuable comments on this edition. Special thanks go to Roly Perera at Ergnosis and to Leonid Arbouzov and his colleagues on Sun's Java platform conformance team in Novosibirsk: Konstantin Bobrovsky, Natalia Golovleva, Vladimir Ivanov, Alexei Kaigorodov, Serguei Katkov, Dmitri Khukhro, Eugene Latkin, Ilya Neverov, Pavel Ozhdikhin, Igor Pyankov, Viatcheslav Rybalov, Serguei Samoilidi, Maxim Sokolnikov, and Vitaly Tchaiko. Their thorough reading of earlier drafts has greatly improved the accuracy of this specification. I am indebted to Martin Odersky and to Andrew Bennett and the members of Sun's javac compiler team, past and present: Iris Garcia, Bill Maddox, David Stoutamire, and Todd Turnidge. They all worked hard to make sure the reference implementation conformed to the specification. For many enjoyable technical exchanges, I thank them and my other colleagues at Sun: Lars Bak, Joshua Bloch, Cliff Click, Robert Field, Mohammad Gharahgouzloo, Ben Gomes, Steffen Grarup, Robert Griesemer, Graham Hamilton, Gordon Hirsch, Peter Kessler, Sheng Liang, James McIlree, Philip Milne, Srdjan Mitrovic, Anand Palaniswamy, Mike Paleczny, Mark Reinhold, Kenneth Russell, Rene Schmidt, David Ungar, Chris Vick, and Hong Zhang. Tricia Jordan, my manager, has been a model of patience, consideration and understanding. Thanks are also due to Larry Abrahams, director of Java 2 Stan dard Edition, for supporting this work. The following individuals all provided useful comments that have contributed to this specification: Godmar Bak, Hans Boehm, Philippe Charles, David Chase, Joe Darcy, Jim des Rivieres, Sophia Drossopoulou, Susan Eisenbach, Paul Haahr, Urs Hoelzle, Bart Jacobs, Kent Johnson, Mark Lillibridge, Norbert Lindenberg, Phillipe Mulet, Kelly O'Hair, Bill Pugh, Cameron Purdy, Anthony Scian, Janice Shepherd, David Shields, John Spicer, Lee Worall, and David Wragg. Suzette Pelouch provided invaluable assistance with the index and, together with Doug Kramer and Atul Dambalkar, assisted with FrameMaker expertise; Mike Hendrickson and Julie Dinicola at AddisonWesley were gracious, helpful and ultimately made this book a reality. On a personal note, I thank my wife Weihong for her love and support. Finally, I'd like to thank my coauthors, James Gosling, Bill Joy, and Guy Steele for inviting me to participate in this work. It has been a pleasure and a priv ilege. Gilad Bracha Los Altos, California April, 2000 This is the FEMALE EDITION of the Dictionary. The MALE edition is almost identical. But NOT quite. Be warned that ONE PARAGRAPH is crucially different. The choice is yours. --- Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars, Female Edition

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley (Sd)
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0201310082
• ISBN 13: 9780201310085
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 544
• Editor: Gosling James