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

Joshua Bloch jjb at google.com
Fri Mar 20 14:19:16 PDT 2009

Tim, This is very clever! While it doesn't allow programmers to create their own interfaces for use with the construct, it allows future release of the platform to broaden the applicability of the construct without changing the language. And it does so without abusing annotations. While it's not a typical uses of packages, it wouldn't be the first time the language gave special standing to a package. For example, members of java.lang are automatically imported on demand.

What do others think?

         Josh

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Tim Peierls <tim at peierls.net> wrote:

How about using a special package -- java.lang.auto, say -- with initially only one or two interfaces -- AutoCloseable and AutoDisposable, say -- and word the ARM proposal so that only subtypes of interfaces with a single, parameterless method that are declared in this special package are allowed in the ARM try-initialization?

The idea here is to remove the decision about which clean-up methods to support from the current proposal and make it a library design issue. --tim

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