[External] : Re: Factory methods & the language model

[Dan Smith]

On Sep 9, 2021, at 1:13 PM, Dan Heidinga <heidinga at redhat.com<mailto:heidinga at redhat.com>> wrote:

but to keep the door open to having both factories and
constructors in identity classes, should we use a different syntax for
factories in primitive classes now?  That way factories would be
"spelled" consistently between primitive and identity classes.  Doing
so diminishes the "codes like a class" story but leaves the door open
for more compatibility in the future.

Enthusiastic +1.

I don't really *want* to do that, but if we think that's where we're headed, it is pretty weird that, say, a factory declaration in an Java interface declaration looks completely different from a factory declaration in a Java primitive class declaration. Or maybe both styles of declaration are supported by primitive classes? And does reflection treat them differently, too? Not sure if this leads anywhere good, but I want to do a bit of thinking through the implications...