JEP update: Value Objects

[John Rose]

P.S. I’d like to emphasize that none of my pleas for caution apply to the
JEP draft titled Value Objects.

That very nice JEP draft merely links to the JEP draft titled Primitive Classes,
which is the JEP with the potential problem I’m taking pains to point out here.

Also, I’m not really demanding a title change here, Dan, but rather asking
everyone to be careful about any presupposition that “of course we will
heal the rift by making all primitives be classes”.  Or even “all primitives
be objects.”  Those are easy ideas to fall into by accident, and I don’t want
us to get needlessly muddled about them as we sort them out.

(Having picked Value as the winner for the first JEP, replacing Primitive
Objects with Primitive Values in the second JEP is not exactly graceful,
is it?  Naming is hard.  If you were to change the title I suggest simply
“Primitives” as the working title, until we figure out exactly what we
want these Primitives to be, relative to other concepts.  Just a suggestion.)

On Nov 29, 2021, at 10:53 PM, John Rose <john.r.rose at oracle.com<mailto:john.r.rose at oracle.com>> wrote:

Two points from me for the record:

1. I re-read the JEP draft now titled Value Objects, and liked everything I saw, including the new/old term “Value” replacing “Pure” and “Inline”.

2. In your mail, and in the companion JEP draft titled Primitive Objects, you refer to “primitive classes” and their objects.  It would make our deliberations simpler, IMO, if we were to title this less prescriptively as “Primitives” or “Primitive Types” or “Primitive Types and Values”, rather than “Primitive Classes”…