Java is a peculiar programming language. It is used in lots of professional business cases and yet regarded as an easy language suitable for beginner studies. Java’s syntax in particular is criticized as bloated and overly strict and on the next blog praised as lenient and powerful. Well, lets have a look at a correct, runnable Java program that I like to show my students:
class $ {
{
System.out.println("hello world");
}
static {
System.out.println("hello, too");
}
$() {
http://www.softwareschneiderei.de
while ($()) {
break http;
}
}
static boolean $() {
return true;
}
public static void main(String[] _$) {
System.out.println($.$());
}
}
This Java code compiles, perhaps with some warnings about unlucky naming and can be run just fine. You might want to guess what its output to the console is. Notice that the code is quiet simple. No shenanigans with Java’s generics or the dark corners of lambda expressions and method handles. In fact, this code compiles and runs correctly since more than 20 years.
Lets dissect the code into its pieces. To really know what’s going on, you need to look into Java’s Language Specification, a magnificent compendium about everything that can be known about Java on the syntax level. If you want to dive even deeper, the Java Virtual Machine Specification might be your cup of tea. But be warned! Nobody on this planet understands everything in it completely. Even the much easier Java Language Specification contains chapters of pure magic, according to Joshua Bloch (you might want to watch the whole presentation, the statement in question is around the 6 minute mark). And in the code example above, we’ve used some of the magic, even if they are beginner level tricks.
What about the money?
The first glaring anomaly in the code is the strange names that are dollar signs or underscores. These are valid names, according to chapter 3.8 about Identifiers. And we’ve done great by choosing them. Let me quote the relevant sentence from this chapter:
“The “Java letters” include uppercase and lowercase ASCII Latin letters A-Z (\u0041-\u005a), and a-z (\u0061-\u007a), and, for historical reasons, the ASCII dollar sign ($, or \u0024) and underscore (_, or \u005f). The dollar sign should be used […]”
Oh, and by the way: Java identifiers are of unlimited length. You could go and write valid Java code that never terminates. We’ve gone the other way and made our names as short as possible – one character. Since identifiers are used as class names, method names, variable names and (implicitly) constructor names, we can name them all alike.
The variable name of the arguments in the main method used to be just an underscore, but somebody at Oracle changed this section of the Language Specification and added the following sentence:
“The underscore may be used in identifiers formed of two or more characters, but it cannot be used as a one-character identifier due to being a keyword.”
This change happened in Java 9. You can rename the variable “_$” to just “_” in Java 8 and it will work (with a warning).
URLs as first-class citizens?
The next thing that probably caught your eye is the URL in the first line of the constructor. It just stands there. And as I told you, the code compiles. This line is actually a combination of two things: A labeled statement and a comment. You already know about end-of-line comments that are started with a double slash. The rather unknown thing is the labeled statement before it, ending with a colon. This is one of the darker regions of the Language Specification, because it essentially introduces a poor man’s goto statement. And they knew it, because they explicitly talk about it:
“Unlike C and C++, the Java programming language has no goto statement; identifier statement labels are used with break…”
And this explains the weird line in the while loop: “break http” doesn’t command Java to do harm to the computer’s Internet connection, but to leave and complete the labeled statement, in our case the while loop. This spares us from the looming infinite loop, but raises another question: What names are allowed as labels? You’ve guessed it, it’s a Java identifier. We could have named our label “$:” instead of “http:” and chuckled about the line “break $”.
So, Java has a goto statement, but it isn’t called as such and it’s crippled to the point of being useless in practice. In my 20+ years of Java programming, I’ve seen it used just once in the wild.
What about it all?
This example of Java code serves me as a reminder that a programming language is what we make out of it. Our Java programs could easily all look like this if we wanted to. It’s not Java’s merit that our code is readable. And it’s not Java’s fault that we write bloated code. Both are results of our choices as programmers, not an inevitableness from the language we program in.
I sometimes venture to the darker regions of programming languages to see what the language could look and feel like if somebody makes the wrong decisions. This code example is from one of those little journeys several years ago. And it proved its worth once again when I tried to compile it with Java 9. Remember the addition in the Language Specification that made the single underscore a keyword? It wasn’t random. Java’s authors want to improve the lambda expressions in Project Amber, specifically in the JEP 302 (Lambda Leftovers). This JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) was planned for Java 10, is still not included in Java 11 and has no clear release date yet. My code gave me the motivation to dig into the topic and made me watch presentations like the one from Brian Goetz at Devoxx 2017 that’s really interesting and a bit unsettling.
Bending things until they break is one way to learn about their limits. What are your ways to learn about programming languages? Do you always stay in the middle lane? Leave a comment on your journeys.
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