The Java Language Specification, Java Se 7 Edition

Written by the inventors of the technology, The Java® Language Specification, Java SE 7 Edition is the definitive technical reference for the Java programming language.

The Java Language Specification, Java SE 7 Edition

James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Gilad Bracha, Alex Buckley

Addison-Wesley

2013

Abstract

The book provides complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the Java programming language. It fully describes the new features added in Java SE 7. The book also includes many explanatory notes and carefully distinguishes the formal rules of the language from the practical behavior of compilers.

The "diamond" syntax and precise rethrow give type inference a new visibility in the Java programming language. To a great extent, inference is worthwhile only if it produces types no less specific than those in a manifestly-typed program prior to Java SE 7.

Otherwise, new code may find inference insufficient, and migration from manifest to inferred types in existing code will be risky. To mitigate the risk, Joe Darcy and Maurizio Cimadamore measured the effectiveness of different inference schemes on a large corpus of open source Java code. Such "quantitative language design" greatly improves confidence in the suitability and safety of the final feature. The challenge of growing a mature language with millions of developers is partially offset by the ability of language designers to learn from developers' actual code

The Java SE 7 platform adds features that cater for non-Java languages, effectively expanding the computational model of the platform. Without changes, the Java programming language would be unable to access or even express some of these features. Its static type system comes under particular stress when invoking code written in dynamically typed languages. Consequently, method invocation in the Java programming language has been modified to support method handle invocation as defined by JSR 292, Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform.