Re: smalltalk vs. Ada

[gerhard.nospam@bigfoot.de (Gerhard Häring)]

On Fri, 08 Jun 2001 17:01:25 -0500, Wes Groleau wrote:
>> Ada has a hierarchial namespace.  In Smalltalk, the class namspace is flat.
>
>Java has a sort of hierarchical namespace, but--here we go again--it's tied
>to a particular implementation: a hierarchical directory structure.

No, it's not (the Java language specification doesn't specify this at all).
This may be an implementation restriction of many of the more popular Java
compilers (most, not all; IIRC IBM's VisualAge only works on a repository, no
files or directories)

For the runtime, this restriction does not exist at all. In fact, you can
implement any custom class loader by extending the abstract class
java.lang.ClassLoader. Typical examples are loading classes from the network
(applets) or from a database.

Gerhard
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