As I often do, I set my goals quite high for this project. And, as usual, lost interest long before those goals are even well-defined, much less near at hand.
My own growing disinterest, preoccupation with other things (such as school work), and a seeming lack of interest from any readers has led me to largely forget about this project.
BUT THERE MAY BE HOPE!
My school semester is nearing its end, so I may be able to resume this project; however, I won't do it alone:
IF ANYONE OUT THERE STILL CARES ABOUT THIS, COMMENT AND LET ME KNOW!!
OTHERWISE THIS WILL DIE!!
As of this writing, not a single comment has been posted on and article of this blog. And that's rather disheartening.
In retrospect, this idea may have been better implemented as a discussion forum... Maybe I'll set one up if some interest is shown.
Thursday, November 4
Thursday, September 16
Rewind: back to syntax
I've decided to back up a bit, away from uChat, and talk more about syntax. Some of this is near universal to all programming languages, some is more Java-specific.
Statements and expressions
Put simply, a statement is any executable line of code in your program. Several languages (Java, C et. al.) require a semicolon at the end of each statement, others don't (optional in perl).
Before I delve too deeply, a couple more terms. A "token" is the compiler's equivalent of a word; it generally has no meaning by itself. Keywords, operators, and identifiers are all tokens, as are braces and other punctuation-like symbols. An "identifier" is a name, it can be the name of a variable, a method, a class, or even a package.
A statement is generally built from expressions. An expression is a token or string of tokens that evaluate to a value. Time for an example:
(Assume that x is an int variable.)
A method call is also an expression: is evaluates to the return value of the method. For example, the Integer.parseInt() method accepts a String and returns an int.
Statements and expressions
Put simply, a statement is any executable line of code in your program. Several languages (Java, C et. al.) require a semicolon at the end of each statement, others don't (optional in perl).
Before I delve too deeply, a couple more terms. A "token" is the compiler's equivalent of a word; it generally has no meaning by itself. Keywords, operators, and identifiers are all tokens, as are braces and other punctuation-like symbols. An "identifier" is a name, it can be the name of a variable, a method, a class, or even a package.
A statement is generally built from expressions. An expression is a token or string of tokens that evaluate to a value. Time for an example:
(Assume that x is an int variable.)
5; // expression: integer literal (also, by itself, a compiler error) x = 5; // statement: puts the value on the right (5) in the variable on the left 3 + 2; // expression: integer literal, evaluates to five (also a compiler error) x = 3 + 2; // statement
A method call is also an expression: is evaluates to the return value of the method. For example, the Integer.parseInt() method accepts a String and returns an int.
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