Eric Bodden

1°C

As I am preparing to hold COMP 520 in Fall, I just read through Michael Schwarzbach’s excellent new version of this lecture. He has one set of exercises on name resolution containing this funny example:

public class java {
    public class lang {
        public class Object {}
    }
}

Give this code to javac and it will bail on you:

mucuna /tmp $ javac java.java
An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.6.0_05). Please file a bug at the
Java Developer Connection (http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport) after checking
the Bug Parade for duplicates. Include your program and the following diagnostic
in your report.  Thank you.
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.sun.tools.javac.comp.Flow.visitIdent(Flow.java:1214)
at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.JCTree$JCIdent.accept(JCTree.java:1547)

Funny, eh?

Last weekend I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Alumni, Friends, and Supporters of the RWTH Aachen University in North America, this time in Atlanta, Georgia. The meeting was organized by our local fellow Gerd Schroth. The organization was excellent, so thanks a lot for that!

We visited the Hartsfield/Jackson Airport (Delta Airlines’ main hub), the Delta world headquarters and its Operation Control Centre and had a guided tour of some architectural highlights (including the Hyatt and Marriott Hotels which each have a gigantic atrium, and the Fox Theatre, which has a very unique style because it was once built for the Shriners).

We finished up the first day with a fabulous German dinner at the Schroths’ place.

On Saturday we visited the CNN world headquarters and the Georgia Aquarium. This night’s dinner took place at the Capital City Club Brookhaven.

Rainer Schuhmann both stayed until Monday and so had enough time to climb Stone Mountain on Sunday afternoon. What a great view!

And all that for only rundabout 150$! Isn’t that a great deal? So if you are an RWTH Alumni and live in the U.S., Canada or Mexico next time there can be no excuse for not joining us

I just returned from a trip to Germany and to AOSD 2008 in Brussels. It was truly a great conference. The research talks were almost all really interesting, I did some great networking and the social program was absolutely outstanding (I just say chocolate tasting and beer tasting!). Some of the talks that I enjoyed most were Aspect Oriented Test Case Instantiation by Benz and the keynotes by Daniel Wiese and Philip Wadler (Mr. “Super-Lambda”). Unfortunately I missed the third keynote because of the social events in the night before

I stayed a few days longer to visit the Programming Technology Lab at VUB, specifically Charlotte Herzeel and Pascal Costanza. Thanks for having me and thanks for all the interesting discussions!

I uploaded some photos to my gallery. In the next days I will be adding photos from our RWTH Alumni meeting which I am currently attending in Atlanta.