mardi 9 octobre 2007

I want closures in Java !

It's true, trying other programming languages, different enough from your main programming language make you a better programmer/designer in general.

My main programming language is Java, but I also do a lot of Ruby, and it definitely helps me to find new technics in Java.

Now, the problem is : the more I use closures in Ruby, the more I miss closures in Java...

However sometimes, even in Java, the only answer to some OOP problem is some sort of closure, implemented via a callback interface with an anonymous inner class. But the syntax cost of such a construct is very high. All the more so since only final local variables can be used in the anonymous inner class.

So. I do hope closure will make it in the next release of Java.

1 commentaire:

Mathias Panzenböck (panzi) a dit…

AFAIK jdk 1.7 will support something like closures. It's a shorter syntax for inner classes that only overload one method (called invoke, I think?). Not much shorter, though.

What I'd like to have in Java would be list comprehension (amongst other things).