On Wednesday 25 August 2004 11:49 am, Ville-Pertti Keinonen wrote:
> John Goerzen wrote:
> Whaat?
>
> I use far more platforms that don't have Java available (at least a
> decent version thereof) than platforms that don't support Python and
> OCaml.

That is *NOT* what I said.  I didn't imply that the Python or OCaml 
support was not available.  I simply implied that it was not 
*INSTALLED*.

[ snip rest of red herring argument ]

> In fact, name a single platform that has a complete, up-to-date Java
> implementation available but doesn't have Python or OCaml available.
> I'll name one that has Python and OCaml but not Java, which I'm using
> right now to write this - FreeBSD/amd64 (ok, an i386 FreeBSD native
> or Linux emulated JDK might work in compatibility mode, but Python
> and OCaml are both amd64 native on this machine).

For my purposes, all of the following work fine:

 * kaffe
 * gij
 * gcj

At least two of those should be available for FreeBSD/amd64.

I rarely need Java features newer than 1.1.

> someone arguing in favor of Java for portability, I think of the many
> times I've been able to natively compile all C programs I might need
> but have had to give up on using Java programs...

You do make a valid point about the availability of JVMs implementing 
Java 1.3 or above.  I am not talking about that, though.

> Sure, it may be that a JRE is already installed for most of your
> users, but this isn't really relevant when the alternative could be
> natively pre-compiled (having one distribution file for all
> architectures is a pretty minimal advantage), and I regularly run

Speak for yourself.  I don't have 20 different machines from all sorts 
of different platforms that I'd like to support.

-- John

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