Project Coin possibilities under JDK 7 plan A and plan B

[Joe Darcy]

Greetings.

As you may have seen Mark Reinhold announce in various venues [1] [2], 
Oracle is rethinking the plan for JDK 7.

In summary, the two plans under consideration with their ship dates are:

 >   Plan A:  JDK 7 (as currently defined)                      Mid 2012
 >
 >   Plan B:  JDK 7 (minus Lambda, Jigsaw, and part of Coin)    Mid 2011
 >            JDK 8 (Lambda, Jigsaw, the rest of Coin, ++)     Late 2012

Oracle is leaning heavily toward plan B, but is also soliciting feedback 
on the plans, as indicated in Mark's announcement.

For Project Coin, the maximum likelihood outcome [3] under plan B is 
that the currently implemented Coin features:

   * binary literals and underscores in literals
   * strings in switch
   * diamond operator
   * improved exception handling
   * simplified varargs method invocation
   * try-with-resources

will be included in JDK 7, subject to future refinements and revisions 
(and even possible removals) as experience is gained with the features.  
The remaining accepted Coin features would then be reconsidered in the 
context of other language changes being planned for JDK 8.

-Joe

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/rethinking_jdk7
[2] 
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk7-dev/2010-September/001528.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_likelihood