Interesting. I know that '\u007B' will produce an opening curly brace
and '\u007D' will give you a closing brace on XP machines. Comes in
handy if you want to use styles without making a .css file. (I know,
like that's hard but I'm experimenting here.)

I don't know if this will work on other systems.

One of the annoying things about this is the compiler does not
complain. You might do this in obscure error messages that don't get
tested,  so it can hide in there for years to baffle your customers.

It would be fun to be rich enough and unencumbered enough to go back
to university.  I'm sure I would enjoy it much more this time, seeing
it for what it is,  a chance to indulge in my curiosity habit with few
other pressing needs on my time.

   Couldn't see the original post on my newsgroup server, so I found it on
Google Groups. Sorry if this headers of this message implies that I'm
replying to someone other than the OP.

</quote>
What does the following program snippet print?

       System.out.println ( 'a' + '\r' );
       System.out.println ( 'a' + "\r" );
       System.out.println ( "a" + '\r' );
       System.out.println ( "a" + "\r" );

for bonus points, what will it print on the Eclipse console?

Be honest. post your answer before you test.
</quote>

   I don't know what the ascii value of a and \r are, so I'll just pretend
they are 42 and 10. Adjust the answers I post accordingly for the real ASCII
values of those characters.

   'a' + '\r' should be seen as a char plus a char, so the two operands
should get promotoed to integers, and you'd get "52" (or 42 + 10) on the
first line.

   'a' + "\r" should do string conversion, and I think (but am not sure)
that 'a' would actually get converted to a string representation of its
ASCII value, rather than to the string "a", so I'd say "42" would be printed
on the next line, followed by an extra blank line due to the "\r".

   Similarly for "a" + '\r', I expect to see "a10" on the next line.

   For "a" + "\r", this should just be string concatenation, so "a" with a
extra newline.

So my final answer is:

<quote>52
42

a10
a

</quote>

   Of course, depending on the console, maybe sending \r alone might mess
things up if it's not considered a line terminator, and you get question
marks or other strange characters. I think Eclipse will handle newlines in
an "intelligent" manner, and so would produce the output I gave above.

   <tries it out>

   Damn. I got 2 out of 4.

   - Oliver