Draft JEP: Launch Single-File Source-Code Programs

[Brian Goetz]

This is a natural (and common) thought, but it turns out to not be the 
best answer.  The design of JShell is heavily influenced by the goal of 
offering a good interactive experience.  When we were first designing 
JShell, we considered whether we also wanted to ask it to do double-duty 
as a batch runner (i.e., this was our first thought too), and went 
through the process of enumerating some of the tradeoffs that would 
entail -- and concluded that doing so risked compromising the primary 
(interactive) mission.

And, we already have a means of running whole Java programs -- the 
launcher -- which can already accept its input in multiple forms (single 
classfile, JAR file, module).  Better to teach it how to accept one more 
variant input.  New users can run programs with

     java HelloWorld.java

and can later learn that if they want to amortize compilation cost over 
multiple runs, they can do

     javac HelloWorld.java
     java HelloWorld



On 2/9/2018 7:32 AM, Lennart Börjeson wrote:
> One comment, though: As a linux/unix user, I'd expect the jshell executable to be the processor for jshell scripts, not the compiler ("java"). This would tie in with the established pattern of other shell script processors/repl, e.g. groovysh, or even plain bash.