PROPOSAL: Lightweight Properties (original) (raw)

Joseph D. Darcy Joe.Darcy at Sun.COM
Fri Mar 6 13:33:04 PST 2009

Schulz, Stefan wrote:

In effect the Property class becomes the generified Field object, so that problem is circumvented.

Well, the generified Field object should be returned by the reference, so that the generic type can be retrieved at compile-time, otherwise it would not make much sense. That's why the example uses the factory method at(), otherwise it will be difficult to have compile time type safety. The only thing it can not do is to check that the chain is correct (i.e in the example above that Foo#bar is a Bar( at compile time. When the PropertyBuilding is building the Property it can, but that is a little later than I would like - but still a great improvement on evalutation time, added to which the chained case is a minority case. You are right. I forgot about the correctness of the chain. And this will only be possible by a new notation. My only question concerns annotations. It is important that the Field object is the real one, and not a synthetic partial copy. The reason for this is so that I can access Annotations. If this will work then I am happy. I don't understand this one. You won't annotate the Field class but the field, so the object returned will have to support Annotation retrieval, I guess. So if FCM is going to be in -7 then my proposal is unnecessary. But of course that makes an assumption and unless I have missed something it seemed to be as far off as Property support. FCM won't. But maybe a proposal for Field-Literals might have a chance, as it seems a coin to me. Not much magic about it, I think. But then again, I might miss the hard parts as I have no real insight into javac etc. @Joe: Would it make sense to file a proposal on Field-Literals or would it be doomed right away? And I am not sure, whether completing such a proposal by Method- and Constructor-Literals would become too big for Coin. Any hint?

I would judge field, method, and constructor literals to be too large for Project Coin.

Cheers,

-Joe

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