Description Ganesh Sittampalam 2004-08-20 05:39:23 EDT

This bug is forked from a discussion in bug 72245. 

The new/FieldInitializerJoinPoints.java test case checks that constant
initializers of final instance fields are not treated as set field join points,
which may not be a sensible thing to do.

Quoting Erik Hilsdale:

My initial take on this is that new/FieldInitializerJoinPoints.java 
may just be wrong.  The problem comes from this really cool bit
o' code:

public class Test {
    public final int x= 3;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
	Test t = new Test();
	t.foo();
    }
    void foo() {
	System.err.println(x);  // a constant reference
	System.err.println(this.x);  // NOT a constant reference
    }
}

the field x, in this case, is a weird thing in Java:  a field that,
when referred to by plain name, must be inlined, but must also have a
runtime value for when it is referred to by qualified name.

For some reason we decided that this was a "constant field" and should
have no set join point.  I'm starting to believe that this should
have a set join point.  The semantics appendix currently (under the
"join points" section) only defines constant fields as static final
fields whose initializer is a constant string object or primitive value,
and I _think_ we should probably migrate the compiler to this behavior
as well.

(Not that we're sure any of this has to do with the actual bug we're
dealing with... Hmm.  Maybe we should create a new bug report crying foul at
new/FieldInitializerJoinPoints.java and move some of the discussion
over there)