[JSR308] Followup on inheritance and recursion

[Michael Ernst]

I wanted to follow up on the discussions about
 * inheritance among annotations, and
 * annotations as annotation members
Thanks to everyone for their good points and attention to constructive
dialogue.

My interpretation of the conversation is that several people have provided
potentially valuable use cases and have helped to sketch out the technical
details.  No one has noted any technical errors.  (Joe Darcy supplied some
general language design philosophy, but his point specifically related to
the annotation extensions turned out not to be a problem.)

The proposed features are not part of JSR 308 at this time, but they may
merit implementation and evaluation.  I have incorporated parts of the
email discussion into the non-normative part of the Type Annotations
Specification, which is linked from
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/jsr308/.  I hope that this will aid people
who wish to critique, extend, implement, or evaluate the design.  Comments
are always welcome.

                    -Mike