Some pullbacks

David M. Lloyd david.lloyd at redhat.com
Wed Jan 30 07:13:45 PST 2013


On 01/29/2013 10:06 AM, Brian Goetz wrote:
> We would like to pull back two small features from the JSR-335 feature
> plan:
>
>   - private methods in interfaces
>   - "package modifier" for package-private visibility
>
> The primary reason is resourcing; cutting some small and inessential
> features made room for deeper work on more important things like type
> inference (on which we've made some big improvements lately!)  Private
> methods are also an incomplete feature; we'd like the full set of
> visibilities, and limiting to public/private was already a compromise
> based on what we thought we could get done in the timeframe we had.  But
> it would still be a rough edge that protected/package were missing.
>
> The second feature, while trivial (though nothing is really trivial),
> loses a lot of justification without at least a move towards the full
> set of accessibilities.  As it stands, it is pretty far afield of
> lambda, nothing else depends on it, and not doing it now does not
> preclude doing it later.  (The only remaining connection to lambda is
> accelerating the death of the phrase "default visibility" to avoid
> confusion with default methods.)

Sounds fine to me.  TBH I found the notion a bit unsettling anyway, and 
what if (for example) the default access level in some future JLS would 
change from "package" to "module"?  It would be a shame to defeat such a 
change solely because we had previously made this decision.

-- 
- DML


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