Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: BGB Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: back to .Net? lesser of two evils? Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:32:45 -0700 Organization: albasani.net Lines: 43 Message-ID: References: <4eb0a862$0$294$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: news.albasani.net hcJmmISa+Ecxj8lhYtBIm6kCvVSIqtOGH3YqIUevyIlRLuQNbEXCsBlLgxIUH7UD5phvqirdm9JRHgC8s1KTdRZu0vyIaQ2Fdp99yJZAVIW2rH3WHDTlNyCjPi4XSGtz NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 21:33:08 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: news.albasani.net; logging-data="PpAmowChjswRSO58LJxYdIMa8d3/43bMCE59Ge4R1A/LCRStHW3ipH5efLpvdIrcBS+JkL6MSBDou+LpN0pC1junUpZEgYvmVJY+mZjaIR8dC1PQDPBqLT4D/2swwLHZ"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@albasani.net" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20110929 Thunderbird/7.0.1 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:QhSomsiHZF5rCyuFcjAUSOXqOcM= Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:9387 On 11/2/2011 10:19 AM, markspace wrote: > On 11/2/2011 10:04 AM, BGB wrote: >> for example, someone could make an extended form of Java >> which adds ifdef's... > > > I rest my case. :-) > but, ifdef is a useful and powerful feature... also, C# has ifdef, so it probably isn't all bad. granted, it may reflect a different development philosophy: what motivates people to choose, say, Java, or C#, or C++, or C, or ... may in turn be driven by different sets of views and development goals. so, Java tries to gain portability via homogeneity. so, the same code works everywhere, because everywhere is the same. C and C++ via being flexible towards heterogeneity. each place is different, but things like typedefs/ifdefs/... can help gloss over most of the differences. granted, it would be nice to have a consistent platform, such that one doesn't really need piles of ifdef's everywhere, but this is not the fault of the existence of ifdef's proper. in a completely homogenous environment, most likely people would simply not need them. however, if one doesn't have them, but are faced with a heterogeneous platform (say, standard JVM vs Android), then one has a mess... granted, apparently (from stuff encountered elsewhere online) some people have been dealing with some of these issues by feeding Java code through the C preprocessor (presumably just prior to feeding it to javac), but I don't know how widespread this sort of practice is. or such...