revised: 02/18/99, 01/31/00, 05/20/02, 01/09/06, 08/24/2008, 06/20/2010, 08/14/2014, 01/19/2015
The previous chapters have discussed computer hardware, computer software, bits and bytes, machine language, language translation, language interpretation, and virtual machines. This chapter assumes that you know all that and are ready to look at Java.
These notes are written for Java 2 Standard Edition version 5.0 or higher. Many features were added to this edition and previous versions will not work as well with these notes. If you are installing Java for the first time on your computer, install the Java Development Kit (JDK) from Oracle. See Appendix B for information on how to do this.
Can the processor of a computer system directly execute source programs written in Java?