list literal gotcha and suggestion

[Nick Parlante]

(snip lots of discussion)

The fact that list-[] syntax is so widely used I find to be a pretty
convincing argument, so I can live with list-[]. Even the Java
Collections toString() and Arrays.toString() use list-[] to print.

But, if list-[] is the syntax, then I think the {} syntax should not
represent a set, so the obvious misuse is a compile error. My gotcha
example new ArrayList<Integer>({3, 1, 4, 1}) looks reasonable but does
something else -- I've found that to be exactly the time and enthusiasm
destroying combination for students. If the set literal were some
awesome feature the tradeoff might be worthwhile, but set literals seem
kind of rare compared to lists and maps. Indeed, list construction is
probably the single most common case, so making the common case a little
more error-prone for the benefit of the rare case seems like a bad tradeoff.

As a supporting example and as Reinier pointed out, Python does
fine without a set literal, so in Java that would be
   new HashSet<>([1, 2, 3])
which doesn't seem like a hardship.

Cheers,

Nick