Annotations for language features

[Artur Biesiadowski]

Reinier Zwitserloot wrote:
> http://projectlombok.org/ is a prototype that lets you play around  
> with what happens when you use annotations for language features.
>
> So far, the sky has not fallen down. On the contrary; they are  
> namespaced and serve as document pointers, so they've been quite nice.
>   

For me, rule of thumb is: if you remove all properties from the source 
code (everywhere, libraries and user code), code should still compile. 
It can fail only on runtime and only because somebody is explicitly 
using reflection to retrieve annotations. So far, all official 
annotations and all proposed ones follow this rule. Even JSR 308 is the 
same - type annotations are optional, meaning that if you would remove 
them from std lib and your code, everything would compile properly.

Project lombok is interesting hack, but I would never, ever like to see 
it happening to official java. Next step and we will end up Borland 
Pascal way and put control instructions in comments/javadoc.

With best regards,
Artur Biesiadowski