Are templated string embedded expressions "method parameters" or "lambdas"?

[Guy Steele]

On Oct 30, 2021, at 1:04 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com<mailto:brian.goetz at oracle.com>> wrote:


I think that deferred semantics could be confusing and it provides too
little benefit to justify its use.  . . .

I'd characterize these argument as "this deferral is too magic and raises too many questions for too little benefit; if you want deferral, do it explicitly with ->.

I will go a step further: the proposed deferral semantics is too _surprising_.

Joe Programmer will look at

FOO."I have \{n+1} apples in my basket and \{c.size()} elements in my collection."

and fully expect that the expressions `n+1` and `c.size()` will be evaluated right away, before any of the magic associated with that dot happens.

There are languages for which deferred evaluation is the norm, the expected way of doing things. Haskell is one of them. Java is NOT one of them.

Java now has a standard strategy for user-specified deferred evaluation: ->.  So it would also be surprising to introduce another, unrelated mechanism for user-specified deferred evaluation without a REALLY compelling reason. (I say “user-specified” because there are certain other mechanisms that are built-in, such as the ? : operator and statements such as `if` and `while`.)

Joe Programmer would expect that if FOO wants to provide for deferred evaluation, it would do so by accepting lambdas, and Joe would expect to provide them.

—Guy

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