Contradictions

So I've got a need to do some work in Rails. Since I've not really used it before, I decided to go through the nice tutorial at Rubyonrails.org. I'm running merrily along when:

% rake db:create
Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.1 (you have 1.2.0). Please `gem update --system` and try again.

Okay, fine. I try it...

% sudo gem update --system
Updating RubyGems
Nothing to update

Huh. Really?

I found this helpful tidbit about updating RubyGems on Mac OS X.

% sudo gem install rubygems-update
Successfully installed rubygems-update-1.3.1
1 gem installed
% sudo update_rubygems
Installing RubyGems 1.3.1
[... a bunch of stuff ...]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RubyGems installed the following executables:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/gem

If `gem` was installed by a previous RubyGems installation, you may need
to remove it by hand.

Well, that definitely looks more promising!

% gem --version
1.3.1

Sweet.

java keyword challenge

Found this C++ coding exercise on twitter this morning: Write a standards-conforming C++ program containing a sequence of at least ten different consecutive keywords not separated by identifiers, operators, punctutation characters, etc.

Pretty fun read.

I thought it would be interesting to try and come up with something similar in Java. It seems like I'm constantly adding "final" everywhere, so it can't be that hard, right?

Here's the list of the Java Language Keywords.

Unfortunately, in Java, we don't have anything we can repeat, like sizeof. Also, some of the java keywords require non-keyword tokens ({, }) to be used (do, while), where their c++ equivalents do not.

Anyway, let's give it a shot:

private static transient volatile boolean b;
private static transient final boolean b2 = true;

5 sequential keywords in a member declaration.

Okay, method declarations:

public static synchronized final native void a();
public static synchronized final strictfp void b() { }

I can't say I've ever used native or strictfp, but that gets us to 6 sequential keywords.

There aren't as many sequential keywords we can use for class declarations:

private static final class c { }
private abstract static class d { }

That's only 4 sequential keywords.

So 6 sequential java keywords. That's my max. Can anyone do better?