Learning Java

Chapter 4. The Java Language

In this chapter, we’ll introduce the framework of the Java language and some of its fundamental facilities. We’re not going to try to provide a full language reference here. Instead, we’ll lay out the basic structures of Java with special attention to how it differs from other languages. For example, we’ll take a close look at arrays in Java, because they are significantly different from those in some other languages. We won’t, on the other hand, spend much time explaining basic language constructs like loops and control structures. Nor will we talk much about Java’s object-oriented side here, as that’s covered in detail in Chapter 5 through Chapter 7.

As always, we’ll try to provide meaningful examples to illustrate how to use Java in everyday programming tasks.

Text Encoding

Java is a language for the Internet. Since the people of the Net speak and write in many different human languages, Java must be able to handle a large number of languages as well. One of the ways in which Java supports international access is through Unicode character encoding. Unicode uses a 16-bit character encoding; it’s a worldwide standard that supports the scripts (character sets) of most languages.^[12]

Java source code can be written using the Unicode character encoding and stored either in its full 16-bit form or with ASCII-encoded Unicode character values. This makes Java a friendly language for non-English-speaking programmers who can use their native alphabet for class, ...