Proposal: Large arrays

[Joe Darcy]

On 03/24/09 02:38 PM, Reinier Zwitserloot wrote:
> Arrays are extremely ugly. They don't follow java's usual semantics at  
> all; they have a read-only field, which java normally doesn't have. I  
> don't actually consider 'length' a field at all. "length" just happens  
> to be java's first context sensitive keyword. They don't have a  
> sensible toString(), which is, well, "stupid" is being too kind,  
> really. Their type system is broken (covariance, which is wrong, see  
> generics), with a patchy runtime hack to make sure you can't actually  
> crash the JVM with it. They are extremely hard to use because they  
> don't grow on demand, and they have 0 useful methods, though some of  
> them have been squirreled away in java.util.Arrays.
>   

... which is generally why I favor letting collection-like types use the 
bracket notation to get and set elements.  That would eliminate the 
syntactically advantages of arrays.

-Joe