Conditional methods "for free"

[Tomas Mikula]

Thanks, Ali,

I knew someone must have had the same idea before :).

Tomas

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 9:28 AM, Ali Ebrahimi
<ali.ebrahimi1781 at gmail.com> wrote:
> see
> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lambda-dev/2010-November/002646.html
> for history.
>
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 6:11 AM, Tomas Mikula <tomas.mikula at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Sep 30, 2014, at 8:10 AM, Simon Ochsenreither <simon at
>> ochsenreither.de> wrote:
>>
>> >   There was a short mention of "conditional methods", e.g. enabling
>> >   methods only for a subset of some generic type.
>>
>> I don't know where conditional methods were mentioned and what their
>> current state is (any links?), but here is an idea how to get
>> conditional methods "for free" on top of two other (missing) features,
>> which would both be useful independently in their own right.
>>
>> The first feature is lower bounds on type parameters, i.e. <U super T>, as
>> in
>>
>>     class Optional<T> {
>>         public <U super T> Optional<U> or(Optional<? extends U> other);
>>     }
>>
>> The other one is to allow multiple type paramater bounds, even if one
>> of the bounds is itself a type variable. That is, allow bounds like <U
>> extends T & Foo> or <U extends Foo super T>.
>>
>> I have no idea how technically feasible these features are, but I have
>> encountered use cases for both of them.
>>
>> Once we have lower bounds and multiple bounds, we can express
>> conditional methods like this:
>>
>>     class Optional<T> {
>>         default <I extends Integer super T> int getAsInt() {
>>             I value = get();
>>             return value.intValue();
>>         }
>>     }
>>
>> Valid substitute for I exists only when T extends Integer, thus the
>> getAsInt() method can effectively be invoked only on
>> Optional<Integer>.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Tomas