The last several weeks I've been skimming through James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steel, Gilad Bracha, The JavaTM Language Specification - 3rd edition. An old book, but I happen to have a printed version around. So I guessed that reading through it would be helpful for me to understand language specification in general.

The main motive behind this endeavor is the revelation of the multitude of languages that I have to work with these days. I've been following development of JavaScript as well and there is a need to understand formal JS specification as it constantly evolves.

The overall experience is rewarding though I only managed to absorb tiny portion from that book. Most Java specific parts are skipped. The following is the note I've taken while reading.

Notes

Goal

Learn the conventions & terminology for language specification. NOT Learning Java for now

Lexical Grammar

  • raw stream of Unicode chars
  • translation (escaped Unicode char)
  • remove white space and comments
  • tokenized
  • syntactic grammar

Extra Notes

  • In translation, the longest possible translation.

Syntactic Grammar

Tokens are the terminal symbols of the syntactic grammar.

Language Compatibility

  • language compatibility
  • platform compatibility
  • migration compatibility

subtype and supertype

Subtyping does not extend through generic types: \( T<:U \) does not imply that \( C\langle T \rangle <: C\langle U \rangle \).

Here we need to understand that subtype relationship is NOT the same as subset.

TODO Some deep digging for the type system theory?

Related to set theory and category theory (all three seem to be able to serve as a foundation of Math.)

I've done some search on this topic, later fill this part with materials found.

TODO There is a clear separation of concepts between Array and Class. Why?

Bewildered concepts

Something we don't truly understand, but nevertheless widely seen.

  • heap pollution
  • capture conversion
  • unchecked warning

Names

  • Simple Names and Qualified Names
  • Names represent entities in a program
  • Declarations with Identifiers introduces entities that have Names into program.

    Names are constructed with identifiers. But not all identifiers are part of Names (e.g. identifier used as label)

Scope

  • Scope of a Declaration

    The scope of a declaration is the region of the program within which the entity declared by the declaration can be referred to with a simple name (provided it is visible, i.e. not shadowed).

  • in scope
  • shadowing vs hiding vs obscuring

Name Obscuring

arise from the resolution of ambiguity of simple names in some contexts.

Identifier

an unlimited-length sequence of Java letters and Java digits.

  • identifiers in labeled statement
  • $3.8

Packages

storage

  • file

    some limitation for this format

  • database

compilation units

Definite Assignment

Key references

Skipped

$8 - $11, from Classes to Exceptions

$13 binary compatibility (dealing with updating widely deployed packages)

Notes End


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Tags • tech • java • specification • prog-lang
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