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

Jeremy Manson jeremy.manson at gmail.com
Sun Mar 15 16:58:01 PDT 2009

Reinier,

I wrote out a long response to each of your points, but I realized that perhaps what it boiled down to was something I said in my previous message: "I'm not objecting to versioning in principle, but I think there are enough unanswered questions that this proposal is probably beyond the scope of "small changes"."

You are saying that if I have a problem with something, it is the -source flag. You are absolutely right: I have problems with the -source flag. Those problems should be sorted out before we include it in the language. Each solution to each of these problems makes this change larger:

  1. API / Classfile compatibility

  2. Backticks for identifiers

  3. A need for thorough documentation for each potential version we support. (You seem to be suggesting that this would be implementation-dependent, but that's unlike everything else in the language. Java is historically opposed to things that are implementation-dependent. Part of the selling point of Java is that code written for / compiled on a version of Java 7 will work with / compile on all compliant Java 7 implementations.).

  4. Is "source" really necessary at the top of the file (you seem to be agreeing that it is), and if so, is that what we actually want?

I also think it would be worthwhile finding out how this proposal gels with the module system they are introducing.

Fundamentally, it seems to me to be a large problem to solve, and I think the right answer is to start a proper JSR and make sure you get it right.

It is, of course, by no means important to Project Coin that I (as one person) happen to think that this change is (or should be) too large. But I suspect that I'm not the only one.

Jeremy

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