Replacing # with backticks for exotic identifiers

[John Rose]

I was updating the Project Coin proposal to take invokeGeneric into account, and added some paragraphs of rationale about the ugly #"exotic identifier" syntax, since that decision sometimes gets comments.

  http://wikis.sun.com/display/mlvm/InterfaceDynamic

In this case, ugly is better than pretty because anything pretty is going to pre-empt a more worthy use of the pretty syntax.

BTW, there is now a patch in the mlvm repository which implements a prototype for method handle literals in the FCM style.  This demonstrates (though there was no credible doubt before) that there is no ambiguity among the various proposed lexical uses of '#'.  Using '#' in two different tokens is just as safe and clear as using the characters '/' '*' 'x' 'e' for various tokens.

Best wishes,
-- John

On Nov 27, 2009, at 3:20 PM, Paul Benedict wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I didn't initiate this suggestion, but I am passing it along because
> it is really good, imo. Furthermore, I've complained about the #""
> syntax and, well, I still complain about it :-)
> 
> Artur Biesiadowski, in the Coin Dev mailing list, made the suggestion
> to replace the #"" notation with backticks [1]. I think his suggestion
> was great for at least four reasons:
> 
> 1) Closures might use pound symbol
> 2) Method literals might use pound symbol
> 3) JavaDoc already uses pound symbol
> 4) Backticks are commonly supported by several RDMS to represent
> exotic identifiers (like table names with spaces).
> 
> Is the pound symbol really the choice favorite by the participants in
> this list? John and Remi, unless your heart is set on it, can you
> consider a change with regards to all the other language changes now
> going to happen?
> 
> Paul
> 
> [1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-November/002556.html
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