Value types: lost design history

[Paul Benedict]

Totally agree. I never understood why these recent language discussions
weren't immediately halted and taken back up on the Coin mailing list. Most
people interested in language features know "Coin" was the old place to
talk about these things. It's too bad all these conversations aren't in one
natural place.


On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com>wrote:

> We need a mailing list where it's appropriate to discuss the design of
> upcoming language features like value types.
> This list isn't quite it, but the level of abuse is smallish:
>
> 15 years ago, Gosling had a design for value types as part of an effort to
> provide better support for numerics.  The web page hosting those ideas
> (fp.html) fell victim to a policy change at Sun and dropped off the Net.
>  Fortunately, the Wayback machine still has a copy, although it is not easy
> to find.
>
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/19990202050412/http://java.sun.com/people/jag/FP.html#classes
>
> I remember waiting for Gosling's proposal to be implemented, but nothing
> ever happened....
>
> Gosling writes that he was influenced by Sather, perhaps indirectly via
> David Stoutamire, who was at Sun at the time.
> Sather's FAQ on "immutable classes" is still online.
> http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~sather/faq.html#19
>
> Their ideas are still good and it seems that the latest generation of java
> language designers may have rediscovered them?
>
>


-- 
Cheers,
Paul