Re: Critique of Ariane 5 paper (finally!)

[nino@complang.tuwien.ac.look-in-sig (Marinos J. Yannikos)]

In article <33EB754E.446B9B3D@eiffel.com>, Bertrand Meyer wrote:
>[...]
>There is no such implication, which would be foolish.
>Microsoft has said they would not support the Java Foundation
>Class libraries. This does not mean they are not making
>Java itself available; but it does break the myth of total and
>automatic Java portability.

Since the JFC are written in 100% Java, Microsoft couldn't prevent them
from working unless they didn't offer "Java" (but something resembling it
only, instead). However, to my knowledge, the dispute between Microsoft
and Sun is focused on Microsoft's announcement to make sure that Java
"works best or only" on their operating systems, thus intentionally
breaking its portability. The article on news.com about this was 
strange, since the actual wording went similar to this: "we, Microsoft
will make sure blah blah... but the death of Java's portability is
inevitable anyway, i.e. they seemed to justify their plans with the
inevitability of their effects (even though noone else had announced 
such intentions at that time).

In any case, "total and automatic portability" is a bit vague, since it
doesn't clarify whether you mean the design or the implementation. The
design itself is mostly (sadly, not entirely, as some of the details
in the Core API are implementation-dependent as far as I can tell)
portable. I don't think that intentionally non-portable implementations
can change that. (besides, in Microsoft's case, there's always the
JDK and JWS for Windows from Sun to run JFC programs on)

-nino
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