Syntax decision

[Stuart Marks]

On 9/30/11 2:53 AM, Zhong Yu wrote:
> After even longer stare, ()->  looks fine to me; it fades in the background.

I think this is an important point, one that Brian Goetz has made a couple 
times. A large component of syntax like/dislike is what one is used to. I had a 
similar experience when I updated the lambda prototypes to the new syntax:

http://hg.openjdk.java.net/lambda/lambda/jdk/rev/d9e4e3c106a7

Initially I liked the #{...} syntax and I was opposed to the C#/Scala style 
syntax when it was proposed. But after having worked with the new style syntax 
for just a couple hours, I got used to it. Yes, there are weird things about 
it, but there are weird things about any syntax.

At this point the #{...} syntax looks old and clunky. Another thing I do not 
miss about the old syntax is that #{ -> expr; } was a statement whereas #{ -> 
stmt } was an expression. A missing or extra semicolon could even change 
overload resolution! The new syntax uses { } to distinguish statement lambdas, 
which is perfectly sensible to me.

Using the new syntax, I went through several phases of using extra parentheses 
in order to highlight the lambda, but I eventually pulled them all out. You can 
see the results in the code: there are very few places with parentheses where 
they aren't required. It's a bit unfortunate that the nilary lambda requires an 
empty pair of parens, but (as others have noted) making them optional seems to 
introduce a bunch of problems and special cases, and having them isn't really 
all that bad, so why not just live with them.

s'marks