Hi, Just adding some perspective after following these language-feature discussions for several years now.
> In my opinion Project Coin was meant only to push some earlier chosen > changes into language. > The initial Project Coin process actually invited proposals from the community. There were many, and the majority were rejected (following varying amounts of analysis and discussion). IIRC, the "underscore in number literals" was one that had not been on the table before, but for which a sound proposal, use-cases, specification, and code were provided by a community member. Bob Lee also submitted a proposal related to generics that made it in, IIRC. That said, the Oracle Java team has made it clear that there are many, many more feature requests than there are time or resources to implement them, even if you could decide which were really worth it. That's been true for many years now, basically since the 90s. Brian Goetz (among others) has addressed this topic - of language changes - to death in various mailing lists over the last few years. His email from 2011 on how the language changes may be handled in the future is probably useful to re-read http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2011-October/003373.html IMO, the chances are low that a loose agreement from a handful of people on this mailing thread will incite the kind folks at Oracle to take action. At this point, someone, perhaps Ulf, could summarize and formalize the proposal in a draft JEP. That said, as far as I know, there has been no open "call for proposed changes to the language" in Java 9. There might be a better outlet for these discussions than the core-libs mailing list. Perhaps a new group on Stack Exchange could be used to flesh proposals out first. Each of our emails here, including this one, takes time away from the members of the core-libs team. My 0.02, Patrick
