Huston, we have a problem !

[Neal Gafter]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 8:34 AM, Florian Weimer <fweimer at bfk.de> wrote:

> It is impossible to implement reification in a backwards-compatible
> fashion.


See <http://gafter.blogspot.com/2006/11/reified-generics-for-java.html> for
one approach that is clearly backwards-compatible.


> And I think it is fair to say that the planned backwards
> compatibility of the generics feature in Java 5 did not materialize in
> practice. 8-(
>

Compatibility is most successful when you don't even notice it.  Few
existing programs failed to compile in Java 5, yet the widely-used
collections APIs are now generic.