For further consideration...

[Joe Darcy]

Greetings.

In the first three weeks  of Project Coin over two dozen proposals have 
been sent to the mailing list for evaluation. The proposals have ranged 
the gamut from new kinds of expressions, to new statements forms, to 
improved generics support.  Thanks to everyone who has sent in 
interesting, thoughtful proposals and contributed to informative 
discussions on the list!

While there is a bit less than a week left in the call for proposals 
period, there has been enough discussion on the list to winnow the slate 
of proposals sent in so far to those that merit further consideration 
for possible inclusion in the platform.

First, Bruce Chapman's proposal to extend the scope of imports to 
include package annotations will be implemented under JLS maintenance so 
further action is unnecessary on this matter as part of Project Coin. 
Second, since the JSR 294 expert group is discussing adding a module 
level of accessibility to the language, the decision of whether or not 
to include Adrian Kuhn's proposal of letting "package" explicitly name 
the default accessibility level will be deferred to that body.  Working 
with Alex, I reviewed the remaining proposals.  Sun believes that the 
following proposals are small enough, have favorable estimated reward to 
effort ratios, and advance the stated criteria of making things 
programmers do everyday easier or supporting platform changes in JDK 7:

     * Strings in switch, Joe Darcy
     * Improved Exception Handling for Java, Neal Gafter
     * Automatic Resource Management, Josh Bloch
     * Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation,
       Jeremy Manson
     * Elvis and Other Null-Safe Operators,
       Written by Neal Gafter and submitted by Stephen Colebourne
     * Simplified Varargs Method Invocation, Bob Lee

As this is just an initial cut and the proposals are not yet in a form 
suitable for direct inclusion in the JLS, work should continue to refine 
these proposed specifications and preferably also to produce prototype 
implementations to allow a more thorough evaluation of the utility and 
scope of the changes.  The email list should focus on improving the 
selected proposals and on getting any remaining new proposals submitted; 
continued discussion of the other proposals is discouraged.

The final list of small language changes will be determined after the 
call for proposals is over so proposals sent in this week are certainly 
still in the running!  The final list will only have around five items 
so it is possible not all the changes above will be on the eventual 
final list.

-Joe