speeding up javac

[Lew]

There was a language I once had to code in (I think it was VAX-11
BASIC) where the signla that a line would be continued was that it had
"&" as its last character. Unfortuinately, not last *visible*
character, because if a space followed the "&", a syntax violation
resulted  (probably more than one, actually), thus code that looked
perfectly correct wouldn't compile. Annoying as hell.

And then there's
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)>

 

[Wojtek]

Mike Schilling wrote :

There was a language I once had to code in (I think it was VAX-11 BASIC)
where the signla that a line would be continued was that it had "&" as its
last character. Unfortuinately, not last *visible* character, because if a
space followed the "&", a syntax violation resulted (probably more than one,
actually), thus code that looked perfectly correct wouldn't compile. Annoying
as hell.

Along with COBOL (and RPG) with its insanely strict column format
requirements. FSM help you if you used a tab

 

[Mike Schilling]

Mike Schilling wrote :

Along with COBOL (and RPG) with its insanely strict column format
requirements. FSM help you if you used a tab

Not a problem if you program them on punched cards, as God intended.
(In that case, you should use tabs; you just need to program the
keypunch to tab to the correct column.)

 

[Martin Gregorie]

Mike Schilling wrote :

Along with COBOL (and RPG) with its insanely strict column format
requirements. FSM help you if you used a tab

I think you'll find that current COBOL dialects don't require the
sequence number column to be present (but it needs to be absent for the
whole program).

RPG4 (which I've never used) was initially hyped as being free format
though I now see they lied, but even RPG3 was pretty easy to write with
the appropriate editor: SEU sets the line layout from the letter in
column 1 and displays an annotated ruler at the top of the screen and
syntax checks each line as its entered.

Anything like that should not be a problem provided there's a decent IDE
with an appropriate language-sensitive editor.

 

[Wojtek]

Martin Gregorie wrote :

Anything like that should not be a problem provided there's a decent IDE
with an appropriate language-sensitive editor.

20 years ago?

 

[Mike Schilling]

Martin Gregorie wrote :

20 years ago?

20 years ago there was emacs on Unix and TPU on VMS; both were
sufficiently programmable to replace tabs and do basic column
alignment.

 

[John B. Matthews]

20 years ago there was emacs on Unix and TPU on VMS; both were
sufficiently programmable to replace tabs and do basic column
alignment.

Twenty-two years ago Symantec Corporation acquired Lightspeed Pascal
from THINK Technologies. Its GUI featured an integrated language-
sensitive editor, debugger and execution environment:

<http://www.mactech.com:16080/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.09/DebuggingPasc
al/index.html>
<http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Symantec-Corporation-Co
mpany-History.html>

 

[Nigel Wade]

I can believe that's the reason, but it's a really poor reason. There are
any number of character sequences of which this is true, and very many of
them are more robust than dash-dash-space. How about dash-dash-colon? Or
dash-space-dash? Trailing spaces are the kind of thing which get added and
removed at random, and so make a very poor feature of a string which you
want to (a) be faithfully carried through the mail and news systems and
(b) not appear spontaneously.

The intention is/was that your signature (including the separator) should be
stored in a an external file which the MUA or news client appends to the
message. It shouldn't be necessary to edit this file unless you want to change
it. The MUA or news client should always append the signature in an identical
way and do so faithfully every time.

 

[Wojtek]

Mike Schilling wrote :

20 years ago there was emacs on Unix and TPU on VMS; both were sufficiently
programmable to replace tabs and do basic column alignment.

I was using a mainframe. There was an editor on it (wierd combinations
of keys to copy/paste. You had to place double chars in the lefthand
two columns) but I cannot remeber the name (SPF?). Anyway I do not
remember it having special characteristics for COBOL.

Note: SPF (or whateber) was so ingrained in the programmer's fingers
that someone produced a DOS based editor which behaved the same strange
way. I think there was even a Windows 3.1 version of it.

 

[Martin Gregorie]

Note: SPF (or whateber) was so ingrained in the programmer's fingers
that someone produced a DOS based editor which behaved the same strange
way. I think there was even a Windows 3.1 version of it.

I had a quick brush with the SPF mainframe editor and I agree it was
somewhat quirky.

However, I was thinking about SEU (Source Editor Utility) which I first
got my hands on under OS/400 though I think it originated on System/38.
That was language sensitive in terms of format as Mike described. It
could also call the compiler's parser on a line by line basis to syntax-
check each line as it was entered. I used it to deal with RPG3, PL/1 and
CL - and there's almost nothing in common between these languages. Its
abilities when it came to command completion and formatting in CL were
amazing. Its UI was only 'adequate' even allowing for it being restricted
to a 24x80 green screen, but that another story.

About the same time I also used EVE on a VAX. That was about the ultimate
in customizable editors. It was supplied as a function library and a
hackable framework that, as issued, let it work as a multi-buffered
programmers editor. Thanks to this structure it was particularly easy to
modify.

 

[G. H. Smith]

I agree that understanding the reasoning is an interesting academic
exercise, but that at this late date the standard's cast in stone and
past changing without considerable social effort.

Undoubtedly other patterns would have had their detractors as well. I
don't even disagree that the current standard might be flawed. It's
just that we're stuck with it, absent the aforementioned considerable
social effort.

Is this conscious irony?

 

[Roedy Green]

That seems odd. My system is somewhat slower than yours,
and a ~ 250 KLOC 1000 file project compiles in about 7
seconds under javac from Java 1.6. The full build just
cleans the .class files and compiles the few roots on
which everything depends (the main entry class and the
entry classes for some plugins). Just how big is your
project?

the key to fast compile is to load javac.exe once and do all your
complies. If you load it once per module, as you used to do with C
make, it will take forever. Ant loads it only once no matter what.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
PM Steven Harper is fixated on the costs of implementing Kyoto, estimated as high as 1% of GDP.
However, he refuses to consider the costs of not implementing Kyoto which the
famous economist Nicholas Stern estimated at 5 to 20% of GDP

 

[Roedy Green]

Agreed. I'd love to know the history of the sigdashes - the trailing space
seems like an incredibly bizarre requirement.

Think of when it came out -- probably at a time when nearly everyone
was a techie with a hex editor. I can still remember my surprise at
seeing VisiCalc marketed as a binary and wondering how a program could
be useful without any modifications for each user. The idea of user
options determined at run time struck me as a novel idea. When
started, you wore a white coat, as if you were in a chemistry lab.



--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com
PM Steven Harper is fixated on the costs of implementing Kyoto, estimated as high as 1% of GDP.
However, he refuses to consider the costs of not implementing Kyoto which the
famous economist Nicholas Stern estimated at 5 to 20% of GDP

 

[Mike Schilling]

About the same time I also used EVE on a VAX. That was about the
ultimate in customizable editors. It was supplied as a function
library and a hackable framework that, as issued, let it work as a
multi-buffered programmers editor. Thanks to this structure it was
particularly easy to modify.

That's the same thing as the TPU that I mentioned. Text Processing
Utility was the language in which the Extensible Vax Editor was
written.

 

[Martin Gregorie]

That's the same thing as the TPU that I mentioned. Text Processing
Utility was the language in which the Extensible Vax Editor was written.

I wondered if it was - its been quite a long time since I set eyes on a
VAX terminal.

I had a bash at building a customised version with EVE but I don't now
remember why. It might have been simply because I was (and still am)
using microEmacs under Microware OS-9 (its the standard editor there) and
wanted to build a microEmacs work-alike as at that point uE hadn't been
ported to VAX.

BTW, microEmacs != Emacs
Its much smaller and written entirely in C.

 

[Tom Anderson]

I agree that understanding the reasoning is an interesting academic
exercise, but that at this late date the standard's cast in stone and
past changing without considerable social effort.

Undoubtedly other patterns would have had their detractors as well. I
don't even disagree that the current standard might be flawed. It's
just that we're stuck with it, absent the aforementioned considerable
social effort.

Oh, i appreciate that - you will notice i have a conformant little sigdash
of my own. But i do want to know who i should be beating up about it.

Heeey, what are you trying to pull here?

tom

--
It's a surprising finding, but that's science all over: the results
are often counterintuitive. And that's exactly why you do scientific
research, to check your assumptions. Otherwise it wouldn't be called
"science", it would be called "assuming", or "guessing", or "making it
up as you go along". -- Ben Goldacre

 

[Tom Anderson]

Twenty-two years ago Symantec Corporation acquired Lightspeed Pascal
from THINK Technologies. Its GUI featured an integrated language-
sensitive editor, debugger and execution environment:

And Smalltalk 80 was 28 years ago. Maybe 29.

tom

--
It's a surprising finding, but that's science all over: the results
are often counterintuitive. And that's exactly why you do scientific
research, to check your assumptions. Otherwise it wouldn't be called
"science", it would be called "assuming", or "guessing", or "making it
up as you go along". -- Ben Goldacre

 

[John B. Matthews]

And Smalltalk 80 was 28 years ago. Maybe 29.

Wait, there's pictures:

<http://bitquabit.com/~revaaron/old/#applest80>

 

[RedGrittyBrick]

Wait, there's pictures:

<http://bitquabit.com/~revaaron/old/#applest80>

A few days ago I was hopeful of discovering the origins of the hyphen
hyphen space signature separator. Individually people writing to c.l.j.p
are intelligent and focussed. Collectively we have the attention span of
a gnat!

 

[Tom Anderson]

Wait, there's pictures:

<http://bitquabit.com/~revaaron/old/#applest80>

I remember it! Probably still got the floppies somewhere. We had a 512 -
effectively an original 1984 Mac with more RAM - and at that point, i
think no second floppy drive, so starting ST80 involved doing the famous
floppy-swapping dance for what felt like a couple of hours (probably about
ten minutes). I think you were supposed to have a fancier machine and copy
it to the hard disk first.

Anyway, the first time i finally got it up, i tried to write a LinkedList
class, but sadly, Smalltalk 80 already has a LinkedList, and it's used in
the VM's thread scheduler, so my attempt to redefine it promptly brought
the system to a flaming halt. That put me off Smalltalk for quite a while!

tom