Yesterday the new front end broke the 20,000 LOC barrier. So,
that’s progress.

The new work is mostly in bytecode generation, since that is
pretty easy, and fun, and I’m avoiding dealing with classification of
expression names.

At this point I’m considering setting up a new project on
Savannah. One problem is Savannah doesn’t seem to have processed new
registrations for a couple of months.

I had heard from a friend that this was good. I didn’t know quite
enough about it or I would have refused to go, I think. Gus Van Sant
stays relentlessly on the surface of things, providing us with an
essentially insight-free depiction of Columbine. Thanks, but my
imagination had already filled in all those details. I’d prefer a
deeper work. My first reaction to this movie was anger, I was tempted
to review it with the single word “exploitive”.

About what I expected. The only other person in the theater
expressed his disappointment to me, but I think his expectations were
set too high. It’s hard to believe much will come from a Ben Affleck
action movie based on one of Philip K. Dick’s second-rate
stories.

This movie was everything I had expected of it. Though of course
I would have seen it even if it had gotten bad reviews, seeing as I’d
already committed to the first two in the series. Let’s hope the same
team makes The Hobbit, as has been rumored.

At various times, though, I had to avert my eyes. Something I
discovered while watching Independence Day is that it’s hard for me
to watch massacres on-screen. This movie was no different, and even
the stylized and obviously-computerized battle scenes were too much
for my temperament.

Also disturbing was the efficacy of the pre-battle motivational
talks given by various kings and heros. Sometimes it seems we’re all
just a rousing speech away from mass destruction. Perhaps I was just
in a susceptible mood that day.

Recently I’ve been working on name lookup. Yesterday I fixed some
name lookup and access bugs (filling in placeholder stubs to make it
actually work). I also started work on expression names and
classification of ambiguous names; until now only type and package
names were implemented.

I also spent some time adding missing parts of the visitor
interface. This is what lets us walk the completed model, to generate
bytecode or lower to gcc’s tree representation. More than half of
bytecode generation has been written, also I’ve done some work on
block handling and relocation processing.

Once expression name handling is done, I’ll be ready to start
resolving method bodies. The major area that remains completely
unimplemented is definite assignment.

I’ve been working on a new front end for gcj. This front end
features strong typing in the representation of the internal model, a
hand-written recursive descent parser, and is intended to be easy to
extend to add support for generics and the other new Java features
(enhanced for loop and static imports are already implemented). It
is written in C++.

Currently it can successfully parse most of libgcj and Eclipse,
and resolve all the extends and implements
clauses. So, it already fixes one gcj bug. I’d estimate, though,
that it is only about 40% done at the moment.

Recently I’ve read the papers describing new Java extensions:
generics, static imports, boxing conversion, enums, and the extended for
loop.

The extensions generally look ok, though in some cases they suffer
a bit from backward compatibility. The real disappointment, though,
is in the papers themselves. I’ve found errors in some of them
(typos, but also more serious problems where the proposed grammar
disagrees with the examples). My general impression is that they
were edited in a rush.

There’s a steamy new romance set in the halls of the New York
District Attorney’s office. It is called “Law and Ardour”.

There’s a new Texan samurai movie called “Yo, Jimbo”.

Parts of this movie overstayed their welcome. Generally, though,
it was a nice exposition of a certain kind of despair, the kind that
ordinarily visits me in hotel rooms and at the holidays. In a sense
this is the perfect Christmas movie.

It doesn’t really deserve the big reviews I’ve seen, though.
After a while I get tired of despair. And unfortunately while the
movies understand fun, they have a difficult time with joy.