On 01/06/2021 21:28, John Rose wrote:
:
Note to self and other reviewers of future versions
of the JVMS: When you see proposed language like
the “unless…” of JVMS 4.7.17, remember today's
conversation and try to avoid putting dark corners
like that into the JVMS.
The RuntimeInvisibleAnnotations attribute is similar to the
RuntimeVisibleAnnotations attribute (§4.7.16), except that the annotations
represented by a RuntimeInvisibleAnnotations attribute must not be made
available for return by reflective APIs, [[WE SHOULD HAVE STOPPED HERE]] unless
the Java Virtual Machine has been instructed to retain these annotations via
some implementation-specific mechanism such as a command line flag. In the
absence of such instructions, the Java Virtual Machine ignores this attribute.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se16/html/jvms-4.html#jvms-4.7.17
Maybe the "unless ..." could be dropped from the JVMS in some future
release. The XX option could be deprecated now so that it won't be a
surprise when it becomes obsolete. On the other hand, maybe it's not
worth doing anything as there are more important things to work on.
-Alan
