It does seem that the spec defines a fully backward compatible implementation such that pre 1.5 packages will still function in the 1.5 environment. Ideally we should develop [math] to provide implementations efficient on both pre 1.5 and 1.5. Its probably easier to battle over design now for pre-1.5 than wait around for the final implementation of Generics to go fully in that direction.According to the JSR: == begin quote == It is explicitly not required that the system ... b) Support the use of primitive types as type arguments: While allowing the use of primitive types (e.g., int, boolean) as type arguments would be nice, it should not be a goal of the design. The separation of primitive and reference types is a fundamental property of the Java programming language. == end quote ==
So, it appears generics are no panacea. At least not in the Java universe.
There is a separate proposal related to auto-boxing and unboxing of
classes like java.lang.Integer that will deal with some of the leftover
pain. If I read the examples correctly, it will mean that things like
"int" and "java.lang.Integer" will be essentially interchangeable at the
source code level. This was discussed in the technical keynote at
JavaOne, and seems quite likely to be part of Tiger (J2SE 1.5) also.
Craig
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But...
There is a prototype compiler available on the Sun EA site for 1.5/generics. It would make for some interesting sandbox projects to begin exploring alternate implementations of various commons projects for this compiler as a stepping stone for taking advantage of the capabilities that will be available in 1.5. Possibly someone could draw together demos/examples of such usage so that Jakarta projects can take advantage of such information to build "roadmaps" to 1.5 capabilities in the near future. Doing this now before the 1.5 release would place Jakarta at a significant advantage to leverage these capabilities and provide new implementations in a "timely" manner that corresponds to the release of 1.5 to the public.
-Mark
-- Mark Diggory Software Developer Harvard MIT Data Center http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu
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