PROJECT COIN SMALL LANGUAGE CHANGE PROPOSAL FORM v1.0
INSTRUCTIONS: For a proposal to be considered, this document must be complete and stand-alone in and of itself. No URLs, citations of papers, etc. can appear except for the limited supplementary information requested in the "REFERENCES" section. A new class file version number can be assumed to be available for -target 7. The proposal must not remove existing features of the language; for example, "Get rid of checked exceptions" would not be considered. As part of being stand-alone, the proposal must not rely on any other language changes that have not already been accepted.
AUTHOR(S): Who are you?
OVERVIEW
Provide a two sentence or shorter description of these five aspects of the feature:
FEATURE SUMMARY: Should be suitable as a summary in a language tutorial.
MAJOR ADVANTAGE: What makes the proposal a favorable change?
MAJOR BENEFIT: Why is the platform better if the proposal is adopted?
MAJOR DISADVANTAGE: There is always a cost.
ALTERNATIVES: Can the benefits and advantages be had some way without a language change?
EXAMPLES
Show us the code!
SIMPLE EXAMPLE: Show the simplest possible program utilizing the new feature.
ADVANCED EXAMPLE: Show advanced usage(s) of the feature.
DETAILS
SPECIFICATION: Describe how the proposal affects the grammar, type system, and meaning of expressions and statements in the Java Programming Language as well as any other known impacts.
COMPILATION: How would the feature be compiled to class files? Show how the simple and advanced examples would be compiled. Compilation can be expressed as at least one of a desugaring to existing source constructs and a translation down to bytecode. If a new bytecode is used or the semantics of an existing bytecode are changed, describe those changes, including how they impact verification. Also discuss any new class file attributes that are introduced. Note that there are many downstream tools that consume class files and that they may to be updated to support the proposal!
TESTING: How can the feature be tested?
LIBRARY SUPPORT: Are any supporting libraries needed for the feature?
REFLECTIVE APIS: Do any of the various and sundry reflection APIs need to be updated? This list of reflective APIs includes but is not limited to core reflection (java.lang.Class and java.lang.reflect.*), javax.lang.model.*, the doclet API, and JPDA.
OTHER CHANGES: Do any other parts of the platform need be updated too? Possibilities include but are not limited to JNI, serialization, and output of the javadoc tool.
MIGRATION: Sketch how a code base could be converted, manually or automatically, to use the new feature.
COMPATIBILITY
BREAKING CHANGES: Are any previously valid programs now invalid? If so, list one.
EXISTING PROGRAMS: How do source and class files of earlier platform versions interact with the feature? Can any new overloadings occur? Can any new overriding occur?
REFERENCES
EXISTING BUGS: Please include a list of any existing Sun bug ids related to this proposal.
URL FOR PROTOTYPE (optional):
