Emmanuel Bourg wrote:
> for (Configuration config : configList)
> {
> config.clearProperty();
> }
>
> That makes me think, couldn't we use the Java 1.5 syntax while
> producing Java 1.3 compatible byte code ?
>
> Emmanuel Bourg
>
We've discussed a 1.5 version of collections some time ago. The upshot
was that we wouldn't be able to maintain backwards compatibility,
primarily to the new language features. Sadly, both 1.5 source and 1.5
bytecode is not backwards compatible wit earlier java versions, so
there's an ongoing effort to reimplement Collections in 1.5 (sadly, what
with the job being awfully busy, my needing to get my bathroom refitted
before Christmas and my recent computer upgrade failing miserably, I
haven't progressed much over the last month or so - you can have a look
at what there is at http://collections15.sourceforge.net). There have
been a number of discussions on the Sun forums about producing source
processing tools that can convert 1.5 source to 1.4 source, but there
are too many annoying incompatibilities for a general solution to work
cleanly.
On the other hand, if you're simply talking about borrowing some of the
1.5 syntax, particularly the new for loop constructs, and somehow using
it in collections, are you really proposing the use of a source
preprocessing stage as part of the collections build process, simply to
allow this syntactic nicety? If so, I don't think that its a goer - it
might break the development process of too many users of collections,
particularly with regard to IDE integration. For example, anyone who's
defined a collections library in IDEA, that refers to both the
collections .zip source file and the binary jar file, would find that
their ability to step into the collections source during debugging will
have been screwed up.
If we really want such syntactic niceties, I reckon we just have to move
wholesale to Java 1.5, and accept the break in backwards compatibility.
Chris Lambrou
P.S. While I'm thinking about it, have there been any steps towards
migrating commons-lang to Java 1.5? Anyone?
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