Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Language Classes

The preceding sections have discussed the basic structure of SymbEL. The remainder of this chapter discuss the features that make SymbEL powerful as a language for extracting, analyzing, and manipulating data from the kernel.

When generalizing a capability, the next step after creation of a library is the development of a syntactic notation which represents the capability that the library provided. The capability in question here is the retrieval of data from the sources within the kernel that provide performance tuning data. SymbEL provides a solution to this problem through the use of predefined language classes that can be used to declare the type of a variable and to designate it as being a special variable. When a variable ...