repeating annotations comments

[Joel Borggrén-Franck]

Hi,

Paul and Remi, have you read the end of Alex' mail? When I read your mails I have a hard time figuring out if you noticed this idea and think even this is to much magic, if if you just missed it.

On Dec 17, 2012, at 5:06 PM, Paul Benedict <pbenedict at apache.org> wrote:

> If you look back in previous discussions, some have opined how they
> don't want incongruity between the reflection data and the developer's
> code. For example, if the code has @A @A, then two annotations should
> be returned (except for legacy reflection methods). I think this
> sentiment should fly out the window. Container annotations are
> mandatory forever. They aren't going away ever -- so why hide them? I
> definitely value all the work that has gone into this enhancement so
> far, but perhaps there can be some 20/20 hindsight and see the
> complexities getting a bit too deep.
> 
> Is there any chance for the EG to consider this as syntactic sugar only?
> 
>>>> 
>>>> Here's an idea. We pondered having the "existing" methods -
>>>> get[Declared]Annotation(Class<T>) and get[Declared]Annotations() - be
>>>> unaware of official containers, so they would return exactly what's in
>>>> the
>>>> class file. Essentially this is perfect behavioral compatibility.
>>>> Meanwhile,
>>>> the new get[Declared]Annotations(Class<T>) methods would look through
>>>> official containers if present. How does that grab you?
>>>> 

cheers
/Joel