[maemo-users] Java

[From: Mark]

On 8/30/09, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, you´re wrong. It´s a platform AND a language.

Actually the truth is somewhere in between. It is technically just a
language, but in order to achieve the goal of platform-independence
(notice the terminology there?) it requires an appropriate "VM" to be
installed on the target machine. It's really just a much more powerful
version of the old "high-level" languages that required run-time
interpreters like BASIC or the Windows scripting language.

Technically, a "platform" is comprised of both hardware and
hardware-specific OS & software, so Java isn't really a platform,
especially since the interpreter is necessarily different for each
target machine hardware & OS, making it impossible to point to any one
setup and say "that's the Java platform".

Mark