Re: Enhancement request

From:

Eric Sosman <Eric.Sosman@sun.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:22:47 -0400

Message-ID:

<1220545301.736014@news1nwk>

Tegiri Nenashi wrote:

[... eliminating the arguments of main ...]
I suggest the main method is used a lot more often than one per
application. I test every sophisticated method by invoking from the
main, e.g.

Class Topology {
   ...
   public static void main( String[] args ) {
      Cylinder c = new Cylinder("a",10,10,10,10);
      Topology t = new Topology(c);
      System.out.println(t.getOpenings());
   }
}

Therefore, almost every class has it. With this usage scenario it is
unjustifiably verbose.

Fifteen characters, the way you've written it. Reducible to
ten characters if you prefer terseness. Your sentence complaining
about verbosity is ninety characters long ...

Next, the others mentioned that the return value of the method is
communicated via System.exit(). Wouldn't elementary consistency
suggest that input arguments should be passed in a similar venue?

One can imagine a System.getArguments() method returning a String[]
containing the command-line arguments. But the current scheme is more
flexible: For example, a method in one class can call the main() of
another class with a specially-tailored set of "command-line" arguments.
It's hard to see how that could be done with System.getArguments(),
particularly in a multi-threaded application.

--
Eric.Sosman@sun.com