[Jsr308-statements] JSR-308 Statements document update (discussion items and grammar changes)

[Trevor Harmon]

On Apr 18, 2007, at 2:10 AM, Michael Ernst wrote:

>> Faking statement annotations by putting blocks around everything is
>> so awkward and error-prone that I hardly think there would be any
>> gain at all.
>
> I am sympathetic to this point of view, particularly because I  
> think it may
> be awkward (but I'm not yet sure how it will work out in practice,  
> and it
> turn out that a block annotation will be simpler), but what would be
> error-prone about it?  Are you worried that people will forget?  The
> compiler will immediately warn in that case.

I don't see how the compiler could do anything. Eugene once gave an  
example of why using blocks as statement annotations is error-prone:

https://lists.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/jsr308/2007-February/000104.html

Note that his example code is perfectly legal according to the Option  
2 grammar, so there'd be no compiler warning.

> It might be good to elucidate
> the argument a bit, because I don't think the above will convince any
> skeptics.  And this:
>
>> It wouldn't even be worth the effort of putting forth a
>> specification, IMHO.
>
> definitely won't!

I wasn't expecting to win over anyone; I'm just saying that if the  
spec starts heading in that direction, I'll no longer have any  
interest in participating.

Trevor