Constable interface should die

[John Rose]

On Sep 22, 2017, at 8:14 AM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> First we tried a more formal separation between "Constable" and "ConstantPoolEntry."  Then we tried a CP-entry-centric approach.  And what that brought us back to was, that the central abstraction here is the symbolic reference

In hindsight here's how I see this choice:

In the JVMS, symbolic references
sit between the low-level constant pool structures of JVMS 4.4
and the resolved "live" values of JVMS 5.4.3.  They are decoupled
from the concrete, static structures of 4.4 but are not yet resolved.
As such, they are exactly the right level for this API, since it
models the unresolved references, but without imitating their
bitwise layouts in the class file.