Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Differences Between C and Java

If you are a C or C++ programmer, you should have found much of the syntax of Java—particularly at the level of operators and statements—to be familiar. Because Java and C are so similar in some ways, it is important for C and C++ programmers to understand where the similarities end. C and Java differ in important ways, as summarized in the following list:

No preprocessor

Java does not include a preprocessor and does not define any analogs of the #define, #include, and #ifdef directives. Constant definitions are replaced with static final fields in Java. (See the java.lang.Math.PI field for an example.) Macro definitions are not available in Java, but advanced compiler technology and inlining has made them less useful. Java does not require an #include directive because Java has no header files. Java class files contain both the class API and the class implementation, and the compiler reads API information from class files as necessary. Java lacks any form of conditional compilation, but its cross-platform portability means that this feature is rarely needed.

No global variables

Java defines a very clean namespace. Packages contain classes, classes contain fields and methods, and methods contain local variables. But Java has no global variables, and thus there is no possibility of namespace collisions among those variables.

Well-defined primitive type sizes

All the primitive types in Java have well-defined sizes. In C, the size of short, int, and long ...