===== Oracle: The Java® Language Specification SE 8 Edition =====
[[dido:public:ra:xapend:xapend.b_stds:defact:orcle:start| return to Oracle de facto Standards ]]

<table>
<caption>Data sheet for The Java® Language Specification</caption>
| Title                      | The Java® Language Specification |
| Acronym                    | Java |
| Version                    | SE 8 Edition |
| Document Number            | |
| Release Date               | 13 February 2015  |
| Reference                  | [[https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/]] |
</table>

  : **Note**: The following is an excerpt from the official site. It is provided here as a convenience and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document as the authoritative reference.

==== Introduction ====
  : //The Java® [[dido:public:ra:xapend:xapend.a_glossary:p:programlang|programming language]] is a general-purpose, concurrent, [[dido:public:ra:xapend:xapend.a_glossary:c:class|class]]-based, object-oriented language. It is designed to be simple enough that many programmers can achieve fluency in the language. The Java programming language is related to C and C++ but is organized rather differently, with a number of aspects of C and C++ omitted and a few ideas from other languages included. It is intended to be a production language, not a research language, and so, as C. A. R. Hoare suggested in his classic paper on language design, the design has avoided including new and untested features.//

  : //The Java programming language is strongly and statically typed. This specification clearly distinguishes between the compile-time errors that can and must be detected at compile time, and those that occur at run time. Compile time normally consists of translating programs into a machine-independent byte code representation. Run-time activities include loading and linking of the classes needed to execute a program, optional machine code generation and dynamic optimization of the program, and actual program execution.//

  : //The Java programming language is a relatively high-level language, in that details of the machine representation are not available through the language. It includes automatic storage management, typically using a garbage collector, to avoid the safety problems of explicit deallocation (as in C's free or C++'s delete). High-[[dido:public:ra:xapend:xapend.a_glossary:p:performance|performance]] garbage-collected implementations can have bounded pauses to support systems programming and real-time applications. The language does not include any unsafe constructs, such as array accesses without index checking, since such unsafe constructs would cause a program to behave in an unspecified way.//

  : //The Java programming language is normally compiled to the bytecode instruction set and binary format defined in The Java [[dido:public:ra:xapend:xapend.a_glossary:v:vm|Virtual Machine]] Specification, Java SE 8 Edition.//


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