Unnamed classes (was: Paving the on-ramp)

[Brian Goetz]

>     If we embrace “it is anonymous” I think we get the cleanest
>     experience. People won’t be tempted to predict the name and refer
>     to it somehow (with reflection or even source code).
>
>     If we embrace “it has a name you didn’t pick” I think we get a
>     simpler onramp story, but at the cost of dark corners in the UE.
>     Users will immediately try to exploit the fact that the name is
>     semi-predictable, and write code that works with the names of
>     these classes.
>
> After reading this (and the other thread), I'm more firmly convinced 
> that using the file name is the right answer due to that "simpler 
> onramp story".  It allows the unnamed class to have a stable name 
> which enables growing it to have proper constructors, referencing it 
> from other classes, etc.  Users trying to predict are learning more 
> advanced features and will be ready to upgrade their classes to have 
> explicit names.  It becomes a much smaller step to then add the 
> opening "class Foo {"  & closing "}".

This is a pretty compelling argument.  You start out with what appears 
to be a "naked" method, you add some more methods, maybe variables 
(sorry Remi) and helper classes, and then at some point, the teacher 
explains "class".  And then says, "hey, you didn't realize it, but you 
already wrote some classes!"  (Cue "you're soaking in it" commercial 
clip from the 70s.)

There's a seed of this argument already in the initial writeup, where 
the `this` receiver has been lurking in the background, and we mostly 
didn't notice or ignored it.  Its there in all the methods, we had no 
reason to hide it, we are just not shining the spotlight on it.  Dan, 
you're saying "exact same thing for the class name".

But, I hear John say, this implicit class sucks, it has a name derived 
from some arbitrary artifact, maybe its name is FOO because the file 
system isn't case sensitive, etc.  OK, well, if you need to use the 
name, and you don't like the implicit one, then .... give it a name.  
You've just learned why we give classes names.

So having explored the alternatives a bit farther, I'm getting more 
comfortable with "accidental name".
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