General community and Process Questions (blog comment followups)

[Ruslan Shevchenko]

>
> So I guess my question becomes (to both Joe and Ruslan), is there
> anything that we can do at this late stage to influence the process?
> If we could put effort into producing a prototype parser now, would
> there still be enough time to consider it? (I've done an ANTLR SQL
> grammar, so, hopefully some of that transfers over)
>

 Look's like you not read next lines in replies to you first letter:

)While the string proposal in question was sent in early,
) went through several helpful iterations of refinement on the list, and
) laudably included a prototype implementation, in the end I thought the
) proposal provided limited benefits over the alternatives for the
) complexity it introduced.

[Joe Darcy]


) I does not think that pre-final version of proposal was
) badly-defined (
)   http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-March/000747.html )

 [I ]// and if you look to proposal, you will see link to implementation.

I.e. we have this proposal well-defined and implemented; all technical
work was done in March.

  This feature was not included  to future considerations for some reasons
(I hope Sun does not plan to drop Java in favor on PL/SQL, but who
knowns:)

If we want push this future into Java, better way will be not require from
project owner to invert previous decisions, but to receive clear unswer on
next question:

What from two sentences:
 - (A) Multiline strings and row literals must not be on Java language for
some reason, forever.
 - (B) Multiline strings and row literals are potentially usefull and can
be added to Java, but unlikely this feature can be fully analyzed and
implemented in project coin becouse of time and complexity limits.

 better reflect Sun (or Joe Darcy) point of view.

 on (A) - we must shut up and switch to (other-favorite-language)
 on (B):
   May be exists possibility add this future not to Java 7 (where we have
strict  schedule), but in Java 7.1 (still without schedule but I hope
in this decade).

For example, anybody can submit JSR, which will be accepted or rejected by
PMO.
In principle, If I receive answer (B) and consent from Joe to participate
in feature development of this feature -- I can submit this JSR on next
day after coin JSR will be submitted. [If somebody from Sun  will submit
one - this will
be better]

May be exists other ways  (for example made coin-like projects regular
will be a good idea).

P.S.  Also I does not want long philosophical discussion, but must say
that language development is not techical task with one solution: if you
believe
this, than you must belive that exists one true ideal programming language.
To say more: if technical problem have only one solution: it's trivial
problem.