Description John Day-Richter 2007-10-02 16:05:41 EDT

Created attachment 79578 [details]
Tarred & gzipped version of a project that exhibits the behavior

Build ID: I20070621-1340

Steps To Reproduce:
1. Open attached project (note that there are no compiler errors)
2. Look at the syntax highlighting for class "C". Notice that it is flagged as a hierarchy error even though it is perfectly legal.


More information:
Under some circumstances, the Eclipse syntax highlighting flags perfectly legal class hierarchies with the "inconsistent class hierarchy", even though the compiler thinks that they're fine.

Check out the attached project to see the problem. Even though the project contains no compile errors, if you open interface "C", Eclipse has highlighted the interface name with an "inconsistent hierarchy" error.

I suspect that this is happening because the syntax highlighter is falsely detecting a cycle in the *hierarchy* (which really is illegal) because of a cycle in the *generics references* (which is perfectly legal, as far as I know).

The bug seems to be specific to a very particular structure of interfaces. For example, look at the InnerExample class. It contains a collection of static inner interfaces whose relationships are perfectly analogous to those specified in the public classes A,B,C, and D. Yet the syntax highlighter doesn't have a problem with these.

Another interesting wrinkle - If you change class B to this:

   public interface B extends A<C> {}

the problem disappears. This is odd, because if the problem is circular class references, this version is to be just as circular as the original version.