Further reading

Generics in C#, Java, and C++

In this interview from quite a while ago Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners talk with Anders Hejlsberg about generics implementations in C# and Java - the differences in their implementations, type erasure vs. runtime instantiation, reflection and how they compare to C++'s template mechanism. This has inspired us to come up with RFC #0193 - and moving our generics implementation closer to the one in the CLR.

Type hinting discussion and contracts

In the recently ongoing type-hints discussion on the PHP internals mailinglist (see also the PHP Wiki), an interesting proposal was made. It suggests using functions to verify argument types instead of introducing a type checking mechanism which is not strict enough for some, not flexible enough for others and too magic for yet another group.

<?php 
  function array_of_numeric($x) {
    foreach ($x as $val) {
      if (!is_numeric($val)) return FALSE;
    }
    return TRUE;
  }
  
  class Arrays {
    public static function sum(array_of_numeric $a) {
      return array_sum($a);
    }
  }
?>

PHP-Arrays: Maps and lists

In the PHP world, arrays are maps are lists:

<?php 
  $a= array(1, 2, 3);                // #1: A list
  $b= array('key' => 'value', ...);  // #2: A map
  $c= array(1, 2, 'a' => 'b');       // #3: Mix of both
?>

Casting an object array to a string array

While testing the new EASC server and client implementations we're currently working on, we asked ourselves how to cast an object array to, for example, a string array.

The following is an array of objects consisting solely of strings:

  Object[] strings= new Object[] { "Hello", "World" };

Exceptions in Java

Found this nice article on exceptions in Java - from a historic overview of Oak, on checked and unchecked exceptions, and asynchronous exceptions it explains nicely (and with code examples) what the Java exception mechanism is about. What I like most are the best practices section, which applies not only to Java:

• Don't Write Own Exceptions
• Write Useful Exceptions
• Throw exceptions early
• Catch exceptions late
• Document exceptions
• Unit Test Exceptions

Frank Kleine on Namespaces

On a short note: In Gathering practical experience with namespaces, Frank describes his first impressions of PHP 5.3 with namespaces:

Oh boy. You should never even think about porting your application completely to namespaces if you do not have enough unit tests!

PHP6 Namespaces patch backported

Beginning of this month, Dmitry Stogov from Zend published a patch implementing namespaces in PHP6.

To be able to begin playing around with it without adding further points of possible failures for our XP unittests with new PHP6 (e.g., unicode-related breakage), I started and after a day's work succeeded in backporting the patch to current CVS HEAD, that is, PHP 5.2.4-dev.

Scala

Found this while surfing the web for Java 7 ideas:

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. It is also fully interoperable with Java.

I can't believe it's not XML!

Really enjoyed reading a weblog entry I found while surfing around for JSON-related stuff.

There seem to be a lot of XML folks who can't understand JSON - yes, Dave, it's not even XML. I have a theory on why that is, but to explain it I need to go into a couple other things first.

Static initializers

Nice to see other folks are adapting the static initializer idea. Too bad the PHP folks won't.

Example:

<?php 
  class Console extends Object {
    public static $out, $err= NULL;
    
    static function __static() {
      self::$out= new OutputStream(STDOUT);
      self::$err= new OutputStream(STDERR);
    }
  }
?>

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