Re: New VSI post on Youtube

On 2024-08-20, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

On 8/20/2024 8:29 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:

At times, Java itself seems to "feel" like it has been designed by theorists
with little real-world experience. All the classes-upon-classes when doing
I/O come to mind here.

>
JCP is just like ANSI, ISO and ECMA.
>
Java is literally designed by committee.
>

It shows. :-)

And there are some horror decisions. The compiler API comes
to my mind - it takes 200 lines to do what you can do in 5 lines
in C#.
>

Also, no dynamic arrays built into the language itself. You need ArrayList()
to implement them or things like ByteArrayOutputStream().

The java.io package may seem a bit complex, but it makes perfect
sense when you learn the structure.
>
The basics is:
>
InputStream - read bytes from anything
     FileInputStream - read bytes from file
     ByteArrayInputStream - read bytes from byte array
     ...
OutputStream - write bytes to anything
     FileOutputStream - write bytes to file
     ByteArrayOutputStream - write bytes to byte array
     ...
Reader - read chars according to encoding from anything
     FileReader - read chars according to encoding from file
     CharArrayReader - read chars according to encoding from char array
     ...
Writer - write chars according to encoding to anything
     FileWriter - write chars according to encoding to file
     CharArrayWriter - write chars according to encoding to char array
     ...
>
All very systematic.
>
On top of that there are two convenience classes to work with text
files:
* BufferedReader that wraps any Reader and provides a readLine method
* PrintWriter that wraps any Writer and provides print, println and
   printf methods
>
Remember that and you can handle 98% of cases.
>
For the last 2% reading the docs will be needed.
>

You forgot about InputStreamReader() to turn an InputStream into a Reader. :-)
After all, why miss the opportunity to have two parallel sets of APIs
(byte versus character) instead of just the one API ? :-)

Goodness knows why they didn't just add something like String's getBytes()
method to the character APIs or add character support to the byte APIs...

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.