Spec updates for inheritance and reflection

Alex Buckley alex.buckley at oracle.com
Wed Sep 12 17:15:47 PDT 2012


I have updated the spec to clarify inheritance of annotations, for both 
singular and repeated annotations. For the first time, there are proper 
definitions of "present" and "directly present" as used throughout 
j.l.r.AnnotatedElement. I work through the implications for core 
reflection of inheritable repeatable annotation types having their 
annotations "overridden" by annotations on a subclass.

I also added a modest section on changes to the language model API, 
consistent with the changes to core reflection.

The spec is at http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~abuckley/8misc.pdf as usual.

Alex

P.S. If you want to play with repeating annotations, check out 
http://jdk8.java.net/type-annotations/ ... thanks to superior code 
wrangling by Joel Franck (repeating annotations) and Werner Dietl (type 
annotations), support for repeating annotations on declarations is 
included in the build. See recent mail on type-annotations-dev for more.



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