Chistmas Gift

Christmas holidays is one of my favourite moment in the year, I have time to see my relatives, read books, play with my kids and hack a little bit. Forewords I think I don't like the most in the strawman proposal is that the syntax for function type and for lambda literal reuse the same symbol '#'. It's something that I've observed when teaching C. The C syntax use * when you declare a pointer type and * when you want to dereference a pointer variable. The fact that * is used twice for different meanings introduces unnecessary confusion and is a burden to understand pointers. In my opinion, we should use a new keyword lambda to define lambda literal and use # for function type. #int(int) fun = lambda(int x) (x); But introducing a new keyword may break existing codes if by example lambda is used as a variable name, a type name, etc. So I decide to hack the javac parser to see if this syntax can be introduced without breaking all existing programs by considering lambda as a contextual keyword.   Defining a lambda with lambda So I've hacked the parser. And guess whar, it's possible to distinguish between a method call named lambda and a lambda literal because in the strawman proposal lambda statement starts with a curly brace ('{') and lambda expression starts with a left parenthesis ('('). So the hacked parser recognizes: A lambda...

Date: December, 27 2009
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/forax/archive/2009/12/27/chistmas-gift

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