PRE-PROPOSAL: Source and Encoding keyword (original) (raw)

Neal Gafter neal at gafter.com
Sat Mar 7 10:11:10 PST 2009

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Roel Spilker <r.spilker at gmail.com> wrote:

Can you please explain how in the current situation the "interaction of code written in different source settings when combined into a single program" was handled just fine, but would fail if we do it using a single javac invocation using the source keyword?

I think you missed my point. Project coin is for small language changes. Small, as in requiring only modest changes to the language specification. This proposal would require a large change to the language specification. The language specification today does NOT talk about mixed version programs, as the specification describes only a single version of the language. You may think it's a bad thing that there is no central specification we can consult to understand how mixed version code should work, and I might even agree. But the spec including the proposed change would be required to describe all versions of the language and their interactions, and much of this specification work would have to be done from scratch. I don't mean to say that is necessarily a bad thing, I just can't imagine how it could be done in the scope of project coin.

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