[JSR308] annotations as arguments to annotations

[Joseph D. Darcy]

Hello.

Jonathan Aldrich wrote:
> Dear JSR 308 team,

Catching up on email...

[snip]

> I'm really curious about why this feature  was not supported in the 
> original spec; it seems like an "obvious" extension but perhaps the 
> developers of JSR 175 didn't see the compelling benefits for 
> representing type refinement systems, or were uncertain about whether 
> it might cause implementation issues.  If anyone has insight I'd be 
> interested to hear it.

The initial goals for JSR 175 were about addressing "... a growing trend 
towards annotating fields, methods, and classes as having particular 
attributes that indicate they should be processed in special ways by 
development tools, deployment tools, or run-time libraries." 
(http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=175)  The use cases under 
consideration were squarely aimed at easing EE programming, not on 
enabling features like optional type systems.

-Joe