Comments on the straw man...

[Stephen Colebourne]

2009/12/16 Mark Reinhold <mr at sun.com>:
> I committed
> publicly to initiate an open discussion, and publishing the straw-man
> proposal seemed the best way to do that.
> I could, alternatively, have waited and posted a more-complete proposal,

Personally, I would have preferred to see a statement of requirements
- "lambda-blocks will have local returns", "this keyword will be
lexically scoped", "function types are required", "short syntax",
"method references are desirable". Instead, we are effectively
extracting requirements from the straw-man.

Mark, would you consider writing up a document at more of a requirements level?

> I could have chosen one of the existing
> proposals as a starting point but that would've been seen, rightly, as
> heavy-handed.  Neither of these alternatives would have been a good way
> to begin an effort to build consensus around the ultimate design.

I'd note that we should not see CFJ 0.6a as one of the original
proposals. It may come from the same author, but the differences are
significant enough to what went before to make it effectively a new
proposal.

> It may well be that one of the existing proposals is a good starting
> point, but I'd like to see some discussion of that topic before making
> such a decision.

As I've indicated, the requirements in the straw-man appear to match
CFJ 0.6a but perhaps there is a requirement we're not seeing?

Stephen