Description Manoj N Palat 2019-02-02 21:05:06 EST

https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-spec-observers/2019-January/001029.html


Highlights from the above link:

Over time, as the language evolves, language designers face a
challenge; the set of keywords imagined in version 1.0 are rarely
suitable for expressing all the things we might ever want our language
to express.

..
## We need a new source of keyword candidates

Every time we confront this problem, the overwhelming tendency is to
punt and pick one of the bad options, because the problem only comes
along every once in a while.  But, with the features in the pipeline, I
expect it will continue to come along with some frequency, and I’d
rather get ahead of it. Given that all of these current options are
problematic, and there is not even a least-problematic move that
applies across all situations, my inclination is to try to expand the
set of lexical forms that can be used as keywords.

...
Here’s some examples where this approach might yield credible
candidates. (Note: none of these are being proposed here; this is
merely an illustrative list of examples of how this mechanism could
form keywords that might, in some particular possible future, be
useful and better than the alternatives we have now.)

   - `non-null`
   - `non-final`
   - `package-private` (the default accessibility for class members, 
currently not denotable)
   - `public-read` (publicly readable, privately writable)
   - `null-checked`
   - `type-static` (a concept needed in Valhalla, which is static 
relative to a particular specialization of a class, rather than the 
class itself)
   - `default-value`
   - `eventually-final` (what the `@Stable` annotation currently suggests)
   - `semi-final` (an alternative to `sealed`)
   - `exhaustive-switch` (opting into exhaustiveness checking for statement
     switches)
   - `enum-class`, `annotation-class`, `record-class` (we might have 
chosen these
      as an alternative to `enum` and `@interface`, had we had the option)
   - `this-class` (to describe the class literal for the current class)
   - `this-return` (a common request is a way to mark a setter or 
builder method
     as returning its receiver)