Re: The Joy of Java

[Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>]

"Perry E. Metzger" writes:
>Scott Brickner writes:
>> I don't understand what you mean by "insufficiently powerful".  It's as
>> expressively powerful as most high-level languages, and computationally
>> Turing equivalent.  It's lack of power seems entirely in the performance
>> arena, which may be solved, eventually.
>
>Java applications can't save files to disk or use data files on
>disk. If you were, for instance, buying two CPU weeks of idle time on
>some machines, you would need stuff like checkpointing or the ability
>to save intermediate results.

It is false that Java applications "can't" save files to disk.  Java
has no I/O facilities, exactly like C and C++ have none.  Any I/O
capability must be provided in external functions.  The applet
environment doesn't include file I/O functions, but it can be easily
added in a reasonably safe way (filesystem object only allocates a fixed
region of real disk space, applets are charged to use it, after the
"rent" is gone, the blocks are freed, etc.)

Java applications may also send checkpoint data or intermediate results
back "home", even in the current environment.