Java Language Specification
The Java Language Specification (short JLS , German " specification of the Java language") is the specification of the semantics and syntax of the programming language Java . It is defined by Oracle and is available in the fifth version (Java SE 8 Edition) as of 2015.
history
The Java language specification was first published in 1996 with the first version of the Java programming language.
The second edition of the language specification appeared in 2000 and was supplemented, among other things, with the new concept of inner classes.
The third edition was published in 2005 and also describes the innovations introduced with Java 5:
- parameterized types for generic programming ,
- an additional, simplified syntax for the "
for" loop, - the implicit conversion between elementary data types and their wrapper classes, the so-called auto-boxing ,
- Enumeration types , the enum s,
- Parameter lists of variable length,
- Import of static class properties, e.g. B. constants and
- Annotations for embedding metadata.
The Java SE 7 Edition appeared in 2012 and also contains the changes introduced with Java 7 as well as some clarifications to existing features. These include:
- A diamond operator for a declaration (e.g.
List<String> strings = new ArrayList<>();) and - switch comparisons across strings
- try-with-resources expression
The Java SE 8 Edition was released in February 2015 and contains the changes introduced with Java 8, mainly for functional programming , lambda expressions and method references.
Web links
- Language specification online (English)
