list literal gotcha and suggestion

[Paul Benedict]

I received my latest MSDN magazine yesterday, and it brought back my
memories of my (very in the past) Visual Basic days. One article
displayed their latest integration with .NET collections. Here are
some excerpts:

Dim aList As New List(Of Integer) = { 1, 2 };
Dim aArray = { 1, 2, 3 };
Dim aMap As New Dictionary(Of Integer, String) From {{1, "Apple"}, {2,
"Orange"}};

It was interesting to see a uniform initialization syntax. No need for
switching symbols to indicate type. Java could do the same since { }
already means initializations for array literals. Someone may want to
think about why Java arrays are initialized with { } but Java lists
would be initialized with [ ]. Sorry, but that isn't consistent.

Here's a short summary of the good alternatives recently mailed:

by Nick Parlante:
List<Integer> piDigits = { 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5 };
Set<Integer> primes = [ 2, 7, 31, 127, 8191, 131071 ];
"or if that [set literals] causes problems, just don't have a literal
for sets. Lists and maps are the most common, so having a syntax for
those cases is the most important."

by Greg Brown:
List<Integer> list = ArrayList.unmodifiableList(1, 2, 3);
Set<String> set = HashSet.unmodifiableSet("a", "b", "c");

by Reinier Zwitserloot
new HashSet<>(["a", "b", "c"]);
List.of("a", "b", "c");

by Stephen Colebourne:
Set<String> set1 = HashSet.of("1", "2", "3");
Set<String> set2 = {1, 2, 3}.toSet();
SortedSet<String> set = {1, 2, 3}.toSortedSet();
MultiSet<String> mset = {1, 2, 3}.toMultiSet();
List<String> list1 = ArrayList.of("1", "2", "3");
List<String> list2 = {"1", "2", "3"};
Map<Integer, String> map1 = {1 : "1", 2 : "2", 3 : "3"};

by Neal Gafter:
"I agree that a solution along these lines [map key:value pair] is a
better approach for these literals.  However, I don't think the binary
":" operator is the best way to
introduce a pair literal.  Besides the ambiguity in the second
position of a ?: expression (which can be resolved by precedence),
this conflicts with the most likely syntax for named parameters*."

by Jonathan Gibbons:
"We could also use JSR 308 annotations to achieve some amount of
compile time checking of varargs argument lists."
class HashSet {
static HashSet<T> of(@Unique T...)
}

by Florian Weimer:
Map<String, Integer> map = new HashMap<String, Integer>() {{
    put("a", 0);
    put("b", 1);
    put("c", 2);
}};

by John Hendrikx:
"Maps however would remain a pain to instantiate.  So a good syntax
for creating maps or more generally, pairs or groups of values would
alleviate that.  Personally I was thinking more along the lines of
providing a constructor like this for Maps:
    public HashMap(Pair<K, V>... pairs);
With some new syntax to easily create Pairs:
    Pair<Integer, String> p = {1: "A"};
Resulting in:
    new HashMap<Integer, String>({1: "A"}, {2: "B"}, {3: "C"});"

Paul