Richard O'Keefe wrote:
On 17 Oct 2008, at 9:53 am, Daryoush Mehrtash wrote:
So does this mean that the reason for complexity of generics is the Java inheritance?
No. The reason for the complexity of generics in Java is that they weren't designed into the language in the first place. It took several attempts and quite a lot of work to come up with a version of generics that was 100% interoperable with earlier JVMs *and* still worth having.
You could have something very like Java generics but without the strangeness if you designed it into the language from the beginning, as Betrand Meyer did with Eiffel. Of course, what _he_ didn't design in from the beginning was lambdas, now present as "agents". Eiffel has its own kinds of strangeness.
Or C# generics, which are built into the IL (in .Net 2.0 and above). In many ways, C# is a very nice language, and having generics fully supported in reflection is pretty cool. I do have some words to say about various ASP.Net libraries, however...