Re: GCJ and Sun going GPL (again)

[fernando at lozano dot eti dot br]

Hi Chris,


> > 1. International keyboard layouts won't work with Linux. I have to choose between typing {. <. \
> > and other symbols required for Java programas or accented characters like �. �. � that I
> > need in comments and strings.
> 
> Do you mean in source code? If so, it's not safe to use non-ASCII
> characters in Java source files, they should always be unicode-escaped,

Well, Me and all Java developers I have worked with type non-ASCII characters in Java source files,
and also in C, PHP, Perl, Python and other source files. I can't see why this should not be safe,
and if I remember correctly it's explicitly supported by the Java language specification.

Sometimes you may have trouble with Latin-1 enconded source files (Fedora expects them to be UTF-8)
but both GCJ, Jikes and Sun javac have command-line options to deal with that. And I suspect ecj
does also, because I though I was using Sun javac during the past weeks but today I checked
alternatives and ecj was indeed the default.

Anyway the keyboard problem remain: I may well be editting Java sources under Netbeans or BlueJ, and
also editting html pages, text documentation files, or message files for my Java application. It's
not productive to have to choose between commas and brackets or accents.

That's the main reason I use Eclipse most of the time, SWT/GTK+ doesn't have problems with
international keyboards.


> e.g. "\u00e0". This has always been the case. I agree that it's stupid,
> and that there should be some kind of encoding declaration for source
> files (or perhaps just say that they must all be UTF-8), but you can't
> really fault the Java compiler for this since as soon as you tried to
> compile on a system with a different locale set your strings would
> break.

Who told the problems was with a java compiler? I am complaining about Sun Swing implementation. The
problem is, Sun Swing won't use our Gnome desktop imput method, and looks like it won't also play
well with XFree / X.org keyboard layouts. That's the problem of reinventing the weel in Java like
Sun did with their Swing and AWT implementation. Classpath extensive use of GTK is much better.


[]s, Fernando Lozano