And yet in the Real-World(TM) applications are made of many different
components, tiers, APIs, SPIs, all often written by different people
with different levels of understanding and particular areas of
expertise, and all expected to Just-Work(TM).

IMHO the time it takes to add the extra bit of syntax would be greatly
less than the time resulting from users of your APIs having to debug
their software because you didn't use generics. That said, its a nicety,
not a necessity.

Are you saying that you write perfect code 100% of the time?

Kind regards,

Lee

"Fail early, fail as early as possible".
Generics supports this concept by moving the deferment of error handling
from runtime to compile-timer.
It does far more than prevent runtime cast errors.

If you always know a variable's type, then why not use a single type as
the only type? Why the hassle of creating all kinds of typed objects and
scalars and casts and such? Waste of time?? Why not go back to VB or Pascal?
-paul-

Getting around that cast would have been quite simple taking care of that at
compile time, just looking at the type on the assignement's left side.
Something like

MyElement c ; c =  someCollection.iterator().next() ;

could automatically be translated into

MyElement c ; c = (MyElement) someCollection.iterator().next() ;

and it would be useful and nice 99% of the time. A pityfull warning would have
been more than enough. But then, generics aren't there just to avoid that
cast, but because there was a significant demand for typed collections as
such.

I should mention that adding the extra cast doesn't bother me either, but
then, specs are not just for you and me :-) As Java gets more involved into
"business", it's just natural to expect the spec to be a biased towards
"productivity" issues. In large business projects where programmers come
and go, and you can't really rely on them to be specially smart or involved.
Typed collections "have been said to be" a convenient way to deal with poor
attention, favouring more quality, which I'm far from sure of. Me too, I would
say the best remedy for poor attention is favouring more attention, but that's
the deal. It is not so to say that type safe collections *weren't* available until
1.5, it's just that type checking had to be dealt with by he programmer, which  
some of us would find only natural, and far mor convenient than the proposed
generics thing, which is (most respectfully) way more of a hassle. I don't
think I'm going to "use" them that much, but it seems we all will have to "get
used" to them :-)

Yeah, what's this business with all the types anyway. Just "Object"
for everything would be completely sufficient, because I know exactly
what I store in all those vars of mine.

Cheap enough.

 Ooompf,
 Harald.

Then don't use it ...  :))

LDB

The try using it, and see if you still think so. :)

How? Is it because of the extra letters to write?  Do you have any
measurements to back this up?

Or to more precisely describe what is going on, both to the computer
and to readers.

Floating point numbers is a waste of time. "Any competent mathematician
should be capable of keeping track of decimal points ... ".

Editors that lets you edit inline is a waste of time. "I don't feel a
need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm
editing".

I'm human? (and Von Neumann and Ken Thompson wasn't :)

/L 'or am I feeding a troll?'

Tee hee. Clearly a BCPL fan!

--
Tim Ward
Brett Ward Limited - www.brettward.co.uk