> No, that's not how it works at all ... Only container code will be creating or referencing such modules This may be true for JBoss & JEE modules. However, the very reason I raised the initial question was because it is NOT true for identifiers embedded in Java bytecode. There are utilities out there now that manipulate bytecode that are driven by script files that specify Java identifiers using a Java-style syntax. I raised the initial question because I have the job of updating such a utility to support Java 9. In part that entails parsing user specified module names out of a script file. If we now need to support quotes and spaces etc in a module identifier then it is going to be a problem.
> In the language, the module identifier is bounded by quite strict syntax If you are a downstream user processing bytecode files rather than source code then that doesn't help. You technically need to support the the broad character range specified by the JVM specification even though you know that the chance that someone will put a space or quote etc in a module name is vanishingly small. > There are zero cases where one would have to parse an arbitrary module identifier from a text file As set out above that is not the case. I'll give you a another perhaps more mainstream example. I imagine that there will be times when errors reporting module issues (e.g. missing modules?) will be written to a log file. It is not uncommon for other applications to read such log files and process the contents. Technically the applications reading such log files should, in their parsing, allow for module names containing spaces and quotes etc because that is what the JVM specification says is possible. > Yes it's allowed (not 0x00 but the others are), but I don't think there is any practical way to actually accomplish injecting most of those values Again, as set out above, it doesn't matter if anyone actually put spaces and quotes etc in a module name. If you are going to be guided by the JVM Spec then sadly you to need to allow for them. > "sanity" characters are selected completely arbitrarily Exactly. That is what makes it so frustrating. I have little doubt that if the people who decided the range of excluded characters had to write the code to parse out module names from text files then we would have a few extra characters excluded and no existing module system would be compromised.
