JDK 9 RFR of JDK-8053918: make the spec for @Documented comprehensible (original) (raw)

Joseph D. Darcy joe.darcy at oracle.com
Mon May 11 23:16:25 UTC 2015

How about as a first sentence

"The Documented meta-annotation indicates whether or not annotations of the annotation types it annotates are considered part of the public contract of the elements they in turn annotate."

(Admittedly still a bit convoluted.)

-Joe

On 5/11/2015 4:07 PM, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:

Although the original "first sentence" is somewhat hard to parse, at least there is a single "first sentence" The rewrite doesn't seem to have such a succint first sentence.

If I were to change just one word in the original first sentence, I would change "with" to "on": - * Indicates that annotations with a type are to be documented by javadoc - * and similar tools by default. + * Indicates that annotations on a type are to be documented by javadoc +* and similar tools by default. -- Jon On 05/11/2015 03:58 PM, joe darcy wrote: Hello,

Some are of the opinion that the specification for the Documented meta-annotation type could be clarified. JDK-8053918: make the spec for @Documented comprehensible http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~darcy/8053918.0/ Please review the patch below which aims to accomplish this. Thanks, -Joe --- old/src/java.base/share/classes/java/lang/annotation/Documented.java 2015-05-11 15:54:37.273033243 -0700 +++ new/src/java.base/share/classes/java/lang/annotation/Documented.java 2015-05-11 15:54:37.153033240 -0700 @@ -26,12 +26,20 @@ package java.lang.annotation; /** - * Indicates that annotations with a type are to be documented by javadoc - * and similar tools by default. This type should be used to annotate the - * declarations of types whose annotations affect the use of annotated - * elements by their clients. If a type declaration is annotated with - * Documented, its annotations become part of the public API - * of the annotated elements. + * When an annotation type A is annotated with {@code + * Documented}, the presence and value of annotations of type A + * are a part of the public contract of the elements A + * annotates. + * + * Conversely, if an annotation type B is not + * annotated with {@code Documented}, the presence and value of + * Bannotations are not part of the public contract of + * the elements B annotates. + * + * Concretely, if an annotation type is annotated with {@code + * Documented}, by default a tool like javadoc will display + * annotations of that type in its output while annotations of + * annotation types without {@code Documented} will not be displayed. * * @author Joshua Bloch * @since 1.5

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