JavaStrings

Once upon a time, String was a primitive object defined in FortressBuiltin. String was implemented as a Java "String", and the world was good, and the tests ran.

That was yesterday.

Today, I'm building a new world in which String is a trait, defined in FortressLibrary. There will be many subtypes of String, but right now, the one that you probably have in your program is called JavaString. JavaString is native, but it's not defined in FortressBuiltin; it's in its own component in the Library.

One consequence of this is that you might have to import JavaString to get something to compile that used to compile just with FortressLibrary. If this turns out to be a big problem, JavaString could be moved into FortressBuiltin.

Andrew Black, 12 August 2008