MethodHandle vs function types

[Neal Gafter]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 1:54 AM, John Rose <John.Rose at sun.com> wrote:

> Based on comments from several people (including you–thanks!) the committee
> has agreed to provide a method handle invocation called "invokeGeneric" that
> provides on-the-fly reference conversions and boxing/unboxing conversions
> (N.B. but not primitive conversions).
>

Why the boxing/unboxing conversions?  Those aren't part of the proposed
function subtype relation or the function subtype relation in any existing
language.  Is this to help support language interop between Java and
languages that have only the reference version of primitives?