tigers, tigers everywhere

[jrtom]

I've installed Tigers [sic] on my desktop and my laptop: now that I have Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", I can finally install the Mac version of Java 1.5 "Tiger" (or 5.0, or whatever they're calling it this week). I'm actually happier about the latter, in a way; I've been waiting for Java 1.5 a lot longer than I've been waiting for the neato-keen features that Mac OS 10.4 has. (Admittedly, Spotlight is pretty cool.)

Comments

Tiger...

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

Since you know all about my ignorance, I have no fear of revealing it: Why is Java 1.5 so cool?

Re: Tiger...

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

A few things (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/relnotes/features.html). The ones that are most important to me are typed collections ("generics"), automatic conversion to and from primitive types and the associated object type (e.g., double and Double), cleaner syntax for iterating over Collections--basically, language features whose net effect is to make certain kinds of code syntactically simpler, and to allow compile-time typechecking that was previously unavailable. I also hear that the new JRE is supposed to be much better about taking advantage of OpenGL hardware acceleration capability where it exists.

Re: Tiger...

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

oh, and a printf equivalent. (Which has been available, sort of, with third-party libraries, but I appreciate having it inside the Java API.)