PROPOSAL: String parameters compile time validation (early beta)

[Artur Biesiadowski]

Reinier Zwitserloot wrote:
>
> The idea is simply to have a literal syntax for regexps, where the 
> compiler will actually put the binary representation of a compiled 
> pattern in the .class source. As I mentioned, this has very 
> significant speed savings, because compiling a regexp is more 
> expensive than applying one, especially for complex regexps that are 
> performance sensitive.
>
> I don't understand your argument about casting. Right now, you get 
> compile-time checking on e.g. the bounds of an integer, but if you 
> cast, you get that check at runtime (or, actually, the bits are just 
> cut off, but you get the point).
>
> The regexp literal notation would literally have the type 'Pattern'. 
> You can try to cast a string to this, but that would obviously fail, 
> and the compiler will in fact error when you try, because String is 
> not a subtype of Pattern. If you want to turn a string into a pattern, 
> you'd use Pattern.compile. So:
>
> Pattern x = /a*a+a*a+/;
> Pattern y = Pattern.compile("a*a+a*a+");


I think that we are talking about different things. As far as I 
understood OP, he wants to have kind of typedef String which accepts 
only certain values. It is not about compile-time Patterns, which are 
just a side requirement. Main topic is to have something like

@Regexp("JustDigits","[0-9]+");

void setPhoneNumber(@Regexp("JustDigits")  String phoneNumber)


Now, you can call it from the code like

obj.setPhoneNumber("12345")

and compile would do a static check if 12345 is fitting "[0-9]+" regexp, 
but you probably would also like to do

String number = someField.getText();
obj.setPhoneNumber(number);

which is not safe. We would need to have something like

String number = someField.getText();
@Regexp("JustDigits") String reallyNumber = 
@Regexp("JustDigits").check(number);
obj.setPhoneNumber(reallyNumber);

Actually, when I think about static code checks like in the first case, 
I don't think it could be pulled out if this crosses class boundary - 
you could recompile receiver class, changing the regexp contents and the 
safety would fail (unless regexp would be included into method signature 
by contents).

Regards,
Artur Biesiadowski