jvm wishes and gripes

[Adam Megacz <gcj at lists dot megacz dot com>]

Cedric Berger <cedric@wireless-networks.com> writes:
> No. they didn't add new bytecodes (at least not in classfiles, what
> the VM do internally is another issue).

If Sun ever gets up the gumption to add instructions, I dearly hope
that stack-allocated objects and *real* generic types (not the
expensive jdk1.4 casting syntax-sugar) are among them.

While I'm wishing, some cleaner syntax for closures would be nice
too... and peace on earth... and a winnebago...

I can't really be the only person who wants this stuff, can I?

Oh yeah, one more thing... why doesn't the Java Language spec allow
this:

  class A {
      A foo() { return null; }
  }

  class B extends A {
      B foo() { return null; }
  }

Plenty of other languages (Haskell, ML) let you do stuff like
this... the code above can't violate typing rules (even if B.foo()
returned actual instances of B instead of just null).

  - a