Annotation cycles (was: repeating annotations)

[Jesse Glick]

On 03/11/2012 06:19 PM, Joe Darcy wrote:
> two annotation types cannot be containers for each other because that would create an illegal cyclic annotation type situation

So long as you are changing the language spec for annotations, why not fix this longstanding irritation too (#6264216), which arbitrarily prevents a rather wide range of 
use cases for annotations? For example, move the cycle check from declaration time to use time, so that the only rejected constructs would be genuinely nonterminating 
cycles that no one would ever intentionally write:

@interface A {
   B[] bs() default {@B};
}
@interface B {
  A as() default {@A};
}
@A class X {} // oops

but so that legitimate cases compile:

@interface A {
   B[] bs() default {};
}
@interface B {
   A[] as() default {};
}
@A(@B(@A)) class X {} // fine