I need your opinion... (original) (raw)

Neal Gafter neal at gafter.com
Sun Mar 22 00:27:18 PDT 2009

A Java-like language went through this kind of change a few years ago and was extremely well received by its users. I understand your philosophical position, but it isn't supported by the evidence.

-----Original Message----- From: Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com> Sent: Sunday, March 22, 2009 12:02 AM To: John Rose <John.Rose at sun.com> Cc: coin-dev <coin-dev at openjdk.java.net> Subject: Re: I need your opinion...

Mark, I have to disagree with my esteemed colleague John on this one. I believe that every language has certain characteristics that make it what it is, and that these things simply shouldn't be changed. I believe that one such attribute of Java is that all declared entities have an explicit declared type. I believe it would do great harm to the language to change this.

Josh

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 1:40 PM, John Rose <John.Rose at sun.com> wrote:

On Mar 21, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Marek KozieĊ‚ wrote:

> Allow final variables and final Fields (except blank final), to not > having explicit Type. Yes. Someone should work exactly this (and no more) into a separate proposal, if it hasn't been done already. -- John Alternatives: "? foo" would sort of work since the "?" works, as a wildcard, for some other type uses, but it is way too strange looking. A new declare-and-assign operator would be nice for a wrist- friendly language, but IMO it is too different from existing Java declaration syntaxes. Beyond subjective esthetics, consistency of syntax is important to both mechanical and biological parsers. Meanwhile, "final" variables avoid ambiguities about programmer intention for additional assignments to mutable variables, so "final" works with extra grace for auto-typed variables.

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