> On Jun 26, 2018, at 6:09 AM, Brian Goetz <brian.go...@oracle.com> wrote: > > >> Here are two more arguments in favor of language-level stripping: >> >> 1. Strings inside annotations aren't left out. Whenever an annotation >> attribute feels like something users may want to use an RSL for, the best we >> can hope for (if we don't have automatic unindenting) is for the >> specification of that attribute to say "consumers of this data really should >> call .align() on this" - quite unsatisfying, and we can be sure most >> annotation specs won't bother. > > This seems like a pretty corner^3 case to me; long strings in annotations are > kind of questionable already, multi-line strings in an annotation seem even > more so, and in those cases where you absolutely need to be divorced from the > incidental indentation, you could just align it yourself correctly, at the > cost of uglier indentation (or pull it out into a static var.)
Just to be clear about dependencies: "pull it out into a static var" only works if the 'align' call is a constant expression. Which it ought to be, yes, but that's a separate feature we'll need to deliver. (And really ought to, I think. Otherwise, if we anticipate some releases in which 'align' calls disrupt what would otherwise be constant expressions, that's a notable argument in favor of the language approach.)
