I was updating the Project Coin proposal to take invokeGeneric into account, and added some paragraphs of rationale about the ugly #"exotic identifier" syntax, since that decision sometimes gets comments.
http://wikis.sun.com/display/mlvm/InterfaceDynamic In this case, ugly is better than pretty because anything pretty is going to pre-empt a more worthy use of the pretty syntax. BTW, there is now a patch in the mlvm repository which implements a prototype for method handle literals in the FCM style. This demonstrates (though there was no credible doubt before) that there is no ambiguity among the various proposed lexical uses of '#'. Using '#' in two different tokens is just as safe and clear as using the characters '/' '*' 'x' 'e' for various tokens. Best wishes, -- John On Nov 27, 2009, at 3:20 PM, Paul Benedict wrote: > Hello, > > I didn't initiate this suggestion, but I am passing it along because > it is really good, imo. Furthermore, I've complained about the #"" > syntax and, well, I still complain about it :-) > > Artur Biesiadowski, in the Coin Dev mailing list, made the suggestion > to replace the #"" notation with backticks [1]. I think his suggestion > was great for at least four reasons: > > 1) Closures might use pound symbol > 2) Method literals might use pound symbol > 3) JavaDoc already uses pound symbol > 4) Backticks are commonly supported by several RDMS to represent > exotic identifiers (like table names with spaces). > > Is the pound symbol really the choice favorite by the participants in > this list? John and Remi, unless your heart is set on it, can you > consider a change with regards to all the other language changes now > going to happen? > > Paul > > [1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/coin-dev/2009-November/002556.html > _______________________________________________ > mlvm-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/mlvm-dev _______________________________________________ mlvm-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/mlvm-dev
