Syntactic Sugar

2008-04-25

There’s only one thing I miss in Java that Ruby doesn’t have:

String[] list = {
  "Foo",
  "Bar",
  "Blaz",
}

Note the last trailing comma. This is a syntax error in Ruby but legal in Java. If you add another element later, you don’t need to remember to add a comma to the previous entry. Minor, sure, but useful, especially with interpreted languages where syntax errors are not found until runtime.