Re: Groovy?

Pat wrote:
> Just curious if anyone is familiar with Groovy, the Java based scripting 
> language.
> 
> I'm wondering how it compares to BeanShell...  good and bad, what can we learn
> from it, etc.

Its really apples and oranges from what I can see.  IMHO BeanShell's 
core value is that it is a superset of the Java syntax.  Groovy's 
advantages over Java (and therefore BeanShell) are primarily that it has 
the syntactic sugar that people expect from scripting languages such as 
syntactic support for maps.

I'm not sure exactly what the argument is against Java incorporating 
syntactic support for maps and such-like, except perhaps that a 
language's syntax should be kept as simple as possible.  The 
introduction of foreach support and other things in 1.5 would seem to 
suggest a relaxation of this attitude.

IMHO rather than adding extensions to a language's syntax, IDEs (*cough* 
Eclipse *cough*) could be smart enough to allow the programmer to create 
"virtual" syntax extensions, for example map.get("hello") could appear 
in their editor as map["hello"] but the more verbose syntax is used when 
the file is saved to disk.

This means that developers could use their favorite syntax extensions 
without forcing them on anyone else.

Ian.


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