Feedback and comments on ARM proposal (original) (raw)

Neal Gafter neal at gafter.com
Thu Mar 19 13:03:29 PDT 2009

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com> wrote:

Experience with C#'s foreach loop and IDisposable/IEnumerable has shown the combination to be very useful, as it avoids some very awkward situations when both resources and loops are used together in a program.

These kinds of issues make me think that more actual experience with the proposed construct will be required before we can have confidence that it is "right". I disagree.  Java long ago rejected the use of iterators that required explicit termination.  This is simply a non-issue in the Java ecosystem.  I'm not saying that it was an entirely good decision, but it is the decision we made.

If we aim to add something like ARM, then we're no longer talking about explicit termination.

In any case, it is because of the existence of these kinds of disagreements that I believe more experience is needed. The risks are too high for us to rush such constructs into the language without carefully considering the interactions, without a substantial opportunity to develop experience with it, and without allowing the proposal's spec to respond to that experience.

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