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

Mark Mahieu markmahieu at googlemail.com
Sat Mar 21 08:30:27 PDT 2009

2009/3/21 Tim Peierls <tim at peierls.net>

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 5:18 PM, Mark Mahieu <markmahieu at googlemail.com>wrote:

Or perhaps a marker interface rather than a special package? That might be more consistent with existing 'special behaviour' (eg. Serializable). And a magic interface seems simpler than a magic package. It would make it a lot easier for people to roll their own AutoXyz variants. OTOH, maybe unrestricted extensibility is just asking for trouble? --tim

Possibly, though I'm sure that people who will 'abuse' ARM by applying it to inappropriate APIs would be just as likely to do so with a restricted set of interfaces anyway. Names like 'close' are wonderfully generic and easy to incorporate into an API if you've convinced yourself that the end justifies the means. I don't think there's any way it (either approach) would allow people to cause trouble with APIs they don't own though. For example, I couldn't get ARM to call Iterator.remove() at the end of my try blocks :)

I guess I'm most interested in those APIs that would otherwise be left out in the cold, like the new JDBC 4 java.sql methods I mentioned in another email.

Mark

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