PROPOSAL: Method and Field Literals (original) (raw)

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Thu Mar 12 03:37:01 PDT 2009

brucechapman at paradise.net.nz wrote:

the proposal would then be incomplete if you did not extend it to cover type literals as well, both as type literals per se and allowing them as annotation element values. Currently class literals cannot represent instantiations of a generic type. If we allow field and method literals of generic types, but don't address the lack of a generic type literal, we haven't gone far enough.

I agree that Java should have type literals, but I think that they are a separate Coin. Feel free to start writing ;-)

Following that line of reasoning, and that the type literal doesn't have a obvious place to put the # consistently with field and method literals, maybe the solution is to use # in a bounding form like these #ArrayList# #PrintWriter.out# #ArrayList.add(String)#

but that might not play nicely with recent discussions about the nature of the LHS when # is used as a dereferencer, and with the FCM/BGGA stuff that it would be good to be considerate of.

Fan (http://fandev.org) uses a postfixed #

ArrayList#

The way to think of this is like the root of a URL, where the suffixes for Field/Method are like URL doc-internal references.

Stephen

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