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Re: Why “new”?

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On Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:43:35 -0500, Joshua Cranmer wrote:

> On 02/04/2011 07:53 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> Java copied C++ in using the word “new” to indicate class instantiation
>> on the heap. (Of course, Java is different in not having any other kind
>> of class instantiation.)
>>
>> But what purpose does this word serve? Java defines no meaning for
>> “classname(args)” different from “new classname(args)”. How many
>> hundreds of times a day do Java programms write something like
>>
>>      classname varname = new classname(args);
>>
>> compared to, dare I say it, Python:
>>
>>      varname = classname(args)
>>
>> I’m surprised Java never added a shorter form, say
>>
>>      classname varname(args);
>>
>> which is of course straight out of C++.
> 
> First off: `new' is a good visual indicator when quickly scanning code.
> 
> Saving keystrokes is not all that important--if it were, then you'd end
> up with wonderfully terse programming languages like APL. I don't care
> if I can write a matrix multiplication in a single line of code, I won't
> be able to understand it 6 months later

(map #(map (partial dotp %) (transpose m2)) m1)

Functional languages let you have that cake and eat it too. :)

Although you'll probably need to use something like Haskell rather than a 
Lisp to get really good numerics performance using generic functional 
operations like map.

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Re: Why “new”? Ken Wesson <kwesson@gmail.com> - 2011-02-05 05:56 +0100

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