To answer several questions from several people: 1) I thought java 1.5 wasn't there because it was not found by emerge -s java emerge -s jre emerge -s blackdown
At that point I just figured it wasn't there. I'm glad to discover I was wrong. 2) I'm not so much itching to use the features, as I am required to teach them. But the significant ones seem to be - Scanner class which smooths one of the major bumps for beginning Java programmers: how to do input without learning the whole language first. - Autoboxing which allows a looser typing of functionally similar entities (the primitives and their wrapper classes). - Generics (type-safe containers) (not really an intro topic, but I'll be teaching a second course too). - True enum - C-style printf, and varargs (yayyyy!) ++ kevin - Iterator for-loop -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list