PROPOSAL: Language Escape Operator

[Joseph D. Darcy]

Hello Bruce.

More proposal catchup...

brucechapman at paradise.net.nz wrote:
> Title Language Escape Operator
>
> latest html version at http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dcvp3mkv_9gdg3jfhg
>
> AUTHOR(S): Bruce Chapman
>
> OVERVIEW
>
>
> FEATURE SUMMARY: 
>
> There is great potential for syntactic sugars to be implemented in tools rather
> than the Java language. One requirement of such a mechanism is that the sugared
> form is NOT valid java source code (otherwise the meaning is ambiguous - is a
> piece of code intended as is, or intended to be desugared). In order to future
> proof such mechanisms it is also desirable that such a syntactic sugar form will
> never become a valid java form due to some unanticipated future language change.
>
>
> A simple way to ensure this is to reserve a character as a language escape,
> effectively it indicates that source code is at that point escaping from the
> java language.
>   

Hmm, not sure how I feel about reserving a character to provide for 
language escape mechanisms; it is certainly easy to implement today 
though ;-)

In the beginning, Java did reserve certain keywords to prevent their 
(mis)use ("auto", "goto") and at least "auto" has appeared in a coin 
proposal or two.  There is certainly potential for code transformers to 
provide useful services, but in the absence of widely-used facilities 
around these lines, I'm inclined to keep the characters available for 
future changes within Java itself.

-Joe