getPermittedSubclasses() on j.l.rClass returning an array of ClassDesc

[Brian Goetz]

> The core reflection API has historically been happy to ignore those corner cases. Instead, it's designed for the typical situation where everything is consistent and available. You're somewhat uncomfortable with this design choice, which is fair, but maybe a better long-term path to getting to a less brittle API is to design a new, lower-level API, rather than trying to slowly introduce a new way of doing things into java.lang.Class.

Maybe.  Right now, reflection is _mostly_ classfile reflection, but with 
a few weird conveniences sprinkled atop (i.e., getMethods() returns all 
public methods, inherited or not), which are just enough to make people 
think that reflection is just a bad implementation of language-level 
reflection.  I would rather pull core reflection _down_ to its true 
spirit (classfile contents), and then separately build more conveniences 
_on top_.