[JSR308] JSR 308 documents and tools released

[Michael Ernst]

Neal-

Thanks for your message, which reiterates points you have made before.

> there is no BNF

It's evident that you are extremely anxious about a formal BNF, and one is
needed before the proposal is finalized.  However, it's frankly not as
important as other issues on our list, and it doesn't seem to be causing
confusion for anyone but you.

As I have asked before, if you think a BNF is the most important thing,
then how about contributing one?  If each person contributes what he thinks
is most important, then we can all make progress.

>       - makes commitments based on semantics (for example, the final
>       paragraph of section 3.3

That section does not make any "commitment".  It merely states design
tradeoffs that must be taken into account.

>    the proposal does
>    not address any of the six contexts that I identified by email to this list
>    on February 24 2007 at 11:28pm.

The first three, at least, have been handled.  The others do remain.

>    - The implementation techniques are inconsistent with javac's design

We are aware that the implementation is not perfect; it's a prototype
intended to let people get experience with the system.  I encourage you to
do so; you might find you like it better once you actually try it.

How about sending a patch that fixes these things?  (Even if you don't like
the syntax, you could easily make the fixes that don't have to do with the
parser; but we would gladly accept parser fixes as well.)  That would be a
great way for you to make a productive contribution to JSR 308.

                     Thanks,

                    -Mike