Change of the toString implementation for annotations

[Rafael Winterhalter]

Another remark about "printability". Array types are printed in their
internal form, i.e. "java.lang.Void[].class" becomes
"Ljava.lang.Void;.class" in the string form.

While I very much agree over the improvements of the toString
implementation of the unresolved values, I still wonder if this special
treatment is really necessary and justify the compatibility break. Are the
curly braces meant to avoid confusion from parsing annotation values where
the braces could also be part of a type literal? Any parser would need to
process the annotation string sensitively anyways as string values could
contain any value, if this is the case.

Best regards, Rafael

2016-07-28 15:38 GMT+02:00 Rafael Winterhalter <rafael.wth at gmail.com>:

> Hi Joe,
> thank you for your answer. Can I ask for the rationale of using {} instead
> of [] only for classes? If the goal was to come closer to the source code
> representation, would this not imply to use curly braces for all array of
> an annotation?
> Thank you for your time! Best regards, Rafael
>
> 2016-07-19 4:13 GMT+02:00 joe darcy <joe.darcy at oracle.com>:
>
>> Hello Rafael,
>>
>> On 7/18/2016 5:43 PM, Rafael Winterhalter wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>> I recognized a failing test on Java 9 caused by a changed return value
>>> returned by toString on an annotation with a class-property.
>>>
>>> When calling toString on an annotation: @interface Foo { Class<?>
>>> value();
>>> } instantiated as @Foo(Bar.class) with Java 8 it would be printed as:
>>>
>>> @Foo(class Bar)
>>>
>>> while in Java 9 it is printed as:
>>>
>>> @Foo(Bar.class)
>>>
>>> Is this change intended? I do not see a big benefit of this
>>> implementation
>>> change and it could break code. In my case, the problem is not that big,
>>> it
>>> is an easy fix but still, I found it a bit surprising.
>>>
>>>
>> I pushed the change your test noticed; it was done as part of
>>
>>     JDK-5040830: (ann) please improve toString() for annotations
>> containing exception proxies
>>     https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-5040830
>>
>> The basic rationale for the change is that "Foo.class" is the syntax that
>> appears when annotations are in source code so the toString() form should
>> generally reflect that.
>>
>> Thanks for running your project against JDK 9 builds; HTH,
>>
>> -Joe
>>
>
>