Questions tagged [java]

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5 votes
0 answers
177 views

How is the Genreal MIDI Soundbank file format structured?

Until today, you can download soundbanks for the Java Sound API from Oracle here. What surprises me is, that they are not hidden on an old subpage -- you find them freely accessible on their website ...
  • 651
17 votes
6 answers
2k views

Why do Java classfiles (and JNI) use a "Frankenstein's monster" encoding crossing UTF-8 and UTF-16? [closed]

It seems like using either UTF-16 or UTF-8 would have been a lot more straightforward than what Java decided on for storing strings in classfiles and JNI payloads. It is a monstrosity that combines ...
  • 1,977
21 votes
8 answers
6k views

Did Pascal programmers really move on to Java in the 90s?

According to this video Pascal suffered great loss of percentage in the 90s. There is, contrary to the common belief that C prevailed over Pascal, a counterargument that Pascal programmers moved on to ...
  • 3,582
10 votes
4 answers
4k views

How was the first release of Java (JDK 1.0) used?

Foreword: I am not trying to accomplish a task using this technology but rather asking about the specific use cases of the very first release, out of curiosity. Was Java used for anything else other ...
  • 203
32 votes
3 answers
4k views

What aspect of portable floating point did Java back down on?

Java was released under the slogan 'write once, run anywhere'; while its adoption was probably more about 'now we have a language that provides garbage collection in a familiar workflow and with a ...
  • 55.3k
3 votes
1 answer
309 views

Are there public tools for developing homebrew Java games for the Nokia 2760?

The Nokia 2760 is a clamshell mobile phone released in 2007 which advertised its Java game support. Ten years ago it was still a very popular phone. There were a number of games either preinstalled or ...
  • 4,337