State of the Lambda

[Joshua Bloch]

Brian,

If the cast is illegal in that position, rather than subtly different, then
I'm much happier.

         Josh

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:

> The syntax for specifying the target type in a method invocation context
>> seems awfully confusing. The draft says:
>>
>>     executor.submit(Callable<String> { -> "foo"} );
>>
>> That looks a heck of a lot like a cast, except it's missing the parens.
>> People will therefore tend to put them in by accident:
>>
>>     executor.submit((Callable<String>) { -> "foo"} );
>>
>
> Indeed, the (CICE-inspired) approach of "stick the type in front of the
> block" looks an awful lot like a cast.  We went back and forth a few times
> on this. The main reasons in favor of this approach are:
>
>  - We have left undefined the type of a naked lambda expression, because it
> is target-typed.  Most of the JLS describes casting rules in terms of
> from-A-to-B.  If we don't know the type of A, it is not really a cast.
>
>  - If we intend to support abstract classes as SAM types (and we do) and we
> intend to support use of non-default-constructor (which we might), there
> needs to be a place to put the constructor arguments.  One choice is to punt
> and say "use anonymous classes there."  Another is to do something really
> CICE-like:
>
>      executor.submit(new Callable<String>(args) { -> "foo"} );
>
> ("new" is optional here; everyone will have opinions.)
>
> A cast does not address this problem.
>
>