PROPOSAL: String parameters compile time validation (early beta)

[Artur Biesiadowski]

Marek Kozieł wrote:
> Validation by regexp-s would be only at compile time (efficiency).
>
> Target is quite clear, but anyone see any problems?
>   

As somebody else said, it might be a part of the JSR 305. But just to 
give you example complications:

can (a{1-3}) be passed to (a+) ? (a|b) passed to (b|a) ? [0-9][a-z] 
passed to [:digit:][:letter:] ?

It might be a nice project for somebody's thesis to work on 
equivalence/superset/subset relationships between regexp (especially fun 
if you take backreferences into account), but I would not put it into 
java type system...

And no, validation only on compile time doesn't make any sense. You 
would need some kind of cast operator on regexp, which would cast 
free-form string into regexp-bound string (and throw exception 
otherwise) - similar to way Class.cast works.

Regards,
Artur Biesiadowski