This Second Edition of The Java Virtual Machine Specification brings the specification of the Java Virtual Machine up to date with the Java 2 platform v1.2. It also includes many corrections and clarifications that update the presentation of the specification without changing the logical specification itself. We have attempted to correct typos and errata (hopefully without introducing new ones) and to add more detail to the specification where it was vague or ambiguous. In particular, we corrected a number of inconsistencies between the First Editions of The Java Virtual Machine Specification and The Java Language Specification.

We thank the many readers who combed through the First Edition of this book and brought problems to our attention. Several individuals and groups deserve special thanks for pointing out problems or contributing directly to the new material.

Carla Schroer and her teams of compatibility testers in Cupertino, California, and Novosibirsk, Russia (with special thanks to Leonid Arbouzov and Alexei Kaigorodov) painstakingly wrote compatibility tests for each testable assertion in the First Edition. In the process they uncovered many places where the original specification was unclear or incomplete. Jeroen Vermeulen, Janice Shepherd, Peter Bertelsen, Roly Perera, Joe Darcy, and Sandra Loosemore have all contributed comments and feedback that have improved this edition. Marilyn Rash and Hilary Selby Polk of Addison Wesley Longman helped us to improve the readability and layout of this edition at the same time as we were incorporating all the technical changes.

Special thanks go to Gilad Bracha, who has brought a new level of rigor to the presentation and has been a major contributor to much of the new material, especially chapters 4 and 5. His dedication to "computational theology" and his commitment to resolving inconsistencies between The Java Virtual Machine Specification and The Java Language Specification have benefited this book tremendously.