What is a language construct? (was Re: Comment on state of Project Jigsaw)

[Rémi Forax]

On 12/21/2011 11:30 PM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> 2011/12/21 14:15 -0800, neal at gafter.com:
>> A language construct is a syntactic construct that appears within source files
>> of the programming language.
>>
>> In this case (if I understand it) the language "addition" is distinct from and
>> never intermixed with syntax of the underlying programming language.  It is
>> therefore a distinct language.
> In purely syntactic terms module declarations are no less intermixed than
> package, import, or type declarations [1], and I don't think anyone would
> argue that those are not part of the language.
>
> - Mark
>
>
> [1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/doc/lang-vm.html#jigsaw-1.3.2

Java is a programming languages with several sources files
and jigsaw introduces a rule to find the module declaration
from a source file. This rule used a convention instead of a
declaration i.e. you don't have to edit all class files
to declare that they are part of a module but you have to use
a precise source layout.

If this layout is defined in the language spec so I don't see the problem.

Rémi