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an interface example to help understand API | 396 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Java's relationship to C++
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 12:35 PM EDT
Oracle's case portrays Java as some wonderfully unique product some engineers
developed on their own, but in reality a lot of it came from C++.

I don't know enough about either language's APIs to know whether this copying
carried over to the APIs but would be surprised if it did not.

Perhaps demonstrating this relationship to the Jury might be helpful in putting
the value of Java in context. And Sun didn't get a license from Bjarne
Stroustrup for copying his language or APIs, did they?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

an interface example to help understand API
Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 12:52 PM EDT
The problem is that the concept of an interface is applied to real physical
components. A firewall has plugs and sockets. Is the plug the interface to the
firewall or the socket?

In fact, the interface is an abstract concept to help people understand plugs
and sockets.

The same thing applies to programs that use library functions. The machine code
contains nothing that can be identified as the interface from the program to a
function. The function code is jumped to directly from the program code.

Not, of course, that either program or library code can be separately identified
in the code, itself, other than as an interpretation of the code file by the
coder. A coder that did not know the language and the language APIs could not do
this interpretation.

If you can see an 'interface' identified in an 'executable' it is because the
conceptual text from the source code that helped the programmer understand the
access to the function as an interface, has found its way into that class file.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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