JDK 7 closures will not have control-invocation statements as a goal, nor will it have non-local returns. He also indicated that access to non-final variables was unlikely. Beyond this, there wasn't much detail on semantics, nor do I believe that there has been much consideration of semantics yet.
Now, I can't vouch for his facts, but it seems accurate, so I am going forward with the assumption that I'm getting it from the horse's mouth.
That said, I want to state what closures in Java 7 will be if they are implemented as stated above. Can you guess? Yeah... sugar syntax for anonymous classes.
As a Java developer, I don't want to complain. Anonymous classes are a major pain in the ass. Any time I attempt some functional programming with them, I always look back and think... that would be so much more elegant with a foreach loop, or some such thing. Anonymous classes are a lot of syntax for very little meat. Getting rid of the painful parts of that syntax will definitely be a good thing.
As a Ruby developer, these so-called "closures" are a laughing stock. Can anyone really claim these are actually closures? Let's just stop kidding ourselves and call them elegant anonymous classes.
Without control-invocation statements or non-local returns, you can't turn a foreach into a method call with a closure. Without access to non-final variables, you have to either move the variable into the class, wrap it in an object, or do the horrible 1 element array trick. You know... construct a 1 length final array which you can then both get and set the element from within the anonymous inner class... it blows.
If my vote matters, it is for waiting till Java 8 and doing closures right, or giving us a little meat for Java 7 closures. Bare minimum, non-final variables have to be accessible.
No comments:
Post a Comment