“100% Java” is the Java developers’ slogan, meaning “Don’t taint your Java software by incorporating non-Java components.” Yet, Java itself is neither 100% pure object or 100% pure object-oriented; it is “tainted” with components of the procedural programming paradigm. The primary goal of this paper is to argue that the decision to incorporate non-object primitive types into Java's otherwise uniform object-oriented language model is a source of problems. By building a world in which objects co-exist with primitive types, and procedural programming constructs co-exist with object-oriented mechanisms, Java offers a single world with a dichotomy of semantics. The paper also, secondarily, offers a solution for the problem.
By: Sherman R. Alpert
Published in: RC21157 in 1998
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