Spec draft for JEP 286 Local Variable Type Inference
Brian Goetz
brian.goetz at oracle.com
Thu Mar 30 19:00:09 UTC 2017
We're not voting yet -- we haven't even explained the issues yet :)
The issue of non-denotable types is where all the complexity (and
opportunity to get it wrong) in this feature lives. Dan will soon post
some examples that hopefully will illustrate why both "just don't infer
them, make the user say what they mean" and "just infer them, they're
types" -- as "simple" and consistent as both of these seem -- are both
extreme (and/or naive) positions.
(FWIW, initially I was in the "just don't infer" camp too; the
attraction of that is that every program with `var` corresponds to an
equivalent program with `var`. But the number of times where inference
produces a capture or intersection is surprisingly high, and it will
absolutely be perceived as "that stupid Java compiler, can't they just
tell that..." Additionally, users will perceive the "penalty" of
inference failure as messing up how their code prettily lines up -- and
likely will seek to distort their code to avoid this aesthetic fail.)
On 3/30/2017 2:24 PM, forax at univ-mlv.fr wrote:
> Having a var that uses a non denotable type seems wrong to me, showing/hiding the type of a var should be a valid refactoring in any cases, IMO.
> So i vote for (2).
More information about the amber-spec-experts
mailing list