Some much-delayed feedback/questions.... * Could the doc make a clearer distinction (throughout) between which facts about int/Integer are happening because we expect *all* bucket-3 classes to work that way, vs. which are special one-off tweaks for the 8 predefined types?
* I'm curious whether it would be *possible* to make `int` no longer a keyword, just a special kind of type alias that normal people don't get to declare. I'm *not* claiming that'd be worth actually doing; just wanting to understand what forces would act to prevent it, as part of understanding everything that makes the 8 builtin types "irredeemably special". * I assume the reason "the JVM type Qjava/lang/Double cannot be encoded with a Class object" is because the distinction between it and D is intentional implementation detail. * Since I think/hope it is *not* true that `int` will be a subtype of `Integer`, it's not 100% clear whether the phrase "array covariance" in the doc is referring to the (desirable) property that `int[] <: Integer[]`. I think it is. * I said in the meeting that "I don't think anyone cares" what kind of exception gets thrown if trying to store null in an `Integer[]` which is secretly an `int[]`. Well, I'm sure that's not at all true. :-) Sorry. * Re: "a basic primitive class may declare an instance field of its own primitive" -- does it really need that field, or can we nuke it and just s/value/this/g throughout the file? If that could work, it would be so much less confusing -- nothing circular! The only magic would be "where are the actual bits??" but you don't see the bits of an object header in `Object.java` either and the number of people this bothers is a very round number. ~~ Since we might really be on the verge of being through with "boxing" for good, here, have an appropriate musical closing! * "Boxing's been good to me, Howard Now I'm told, you're growing old The whole time you knew, in a couple of years I'd be through Has boxing been good to you?"* https://youtu.be/UtIp6uP13kk?t=30 On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 4:22 PM Dan Smith <daniel.sm...@oracle.com> wrote: > I'm made some revisions to JEP 402 to better track with the revised JEP > 401—in particular backing off of "everything is an object". > > There were some short-lived changes where I more aggressively pursued the > idea that the class was named 'int', but I've backed off of that, too. Now > taking the more conservative approach that there is a primitive class named > 'Integer', but by special rule its primitive type is expressed 'int', and > the class name refers to the reference type. > > I realize that much of this could potentially change—reflection story, > terminology, etc. But consider this the "plan of record" for now. > > https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8259731 -- Kevin Bourrillion | Java Librarian | Google, Inc. | kev...@google.com
