It’s just data
JSR 201 [via Andres Aguiar]. I personally don't care who gets to claim credit for this, it is just nice to see forward motion.
Update: There are current draft specs for enumerations, autoboxing, enhanced for loop, static import. [via James Strachan]
And the lines blur. Quoting myself seems so self indulgent but here goes
"It is my opinion that both languages are similar enough that they could be made to mirror each other without significant effort if so required by either user base. In this case, C# would have it easier than Java in that C# has less to borrow from Java than Java would have to borrow from C#.
However, the true worth of a programming language ...is how quickly the language evolves to adapt to the changing technological landscape "
http://www.25hoursaday.com/CsharpVsJava.html#conclusion
Posted by Dare Obasanjo
IMO these are just syntactic sugars. Instead of spending the time with them, a much better approach would be to provide macros support with the standard Java libraries.
The nice part about macros is that it doesn't require any changes in the compiler or JVM, everything can be built as a preprocessor. I've written in my Weblog about Java Syntactic Extensions (http://www.ai.mit.edu/~jrb/jse/index.htm) and how it can be used to implement the syntax extensions proposed by JSR201:
http://www.webweavertech.com/ovidiu/weblog/archives/000120.html
Posted by Ovidiu Predescu