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by Tim Vernum.
Original Post: Java 7 Language Features
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I wanted to respond to Danny Coward's
blog entry on Java 7, but his spam detection seem somewhat too rigourous,
so I'm making my comments here My few thoughts:
I'm in favour of having concise property access syntax, but I'm not 100%
convinced on the arrow operator. I understand the concern about having the dot
operator be ambiguous, and the potential performance penalties that can occur,
but I think those fears are being over played. To my thinking the cost of
having two different member access operators is worse. Having
bean->property and bean.getProperty() mean the
same thing segments the development space. Some people will use one, and some
people the other. If I'm using an IDE with content assist, then I have to know
whether I'm looking for a method or a property before I start typing. If we
really need to have a different syntax I'd prefer something like
bean.getProperty() and bean.@property or
bean.$property - something that makes it clear that the difference
is in what sort of member you're accessing rather than what sort of operator
you use to get it. (NB: I spent a fair bit of time playing with Sather, so I'm
probably more comfortable than most people with
transparent property access)
If we are going to get syntactical support for declaring property
accessors, then I have 2 requests:
It should be a transparent change to clients if I need to convert that from
a property accessor to a standard pair of methods (or just a getter
method)
Please please please don't give XML special treatment in the
language. If we've found that working with arbitrary dynamic object graphs is
too difficult then find a way to support them, but please do not make it XML
specific. XML is not that important. I've had multiple situations where I've
wanted to dynamically access properties from object graphs - I'd love a neat
syntax for it. Please don't make this a XML-only solution. As Neal likes to
quote Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top
of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make
additional features appear necessary. (R6RS)
I know others have said this, but I'll repeat them - please make sure JAMs
play nicely with OSGi bundles.
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