Hi all,
as Brian said recently, we have an issue because we are shortening the class
declaration (with records) or wants to declare in a single compilation unit a
hierarchy of types (with sealed types) and currently Java requires that a
compilation unit can only have one public class.
One solution is to get ride of this constraint, because it may be a good idea
in 1995 but today we are writing programs that have far more classes (the
introduction of modules recently was also driven by that idea). I propose
another way of solving that issue, introducing a mechanism to opt-in to have
more than one public class in a compilation unit.
Currently we have the mechanism of nestmates which has a runtime representation
(VM + reflection) but no language representation, i propose to introduce a new
declaration in the language in between the package declaration and the first
import,
nest NestHostClass;
which define the class that will be used as nest host (obviously it can be
another keyword instead of "nest").
So a closed hierarchy can defines like this in one compilation unit:
nest Expr;
public sealed Expr permits Variable, Value, Add;
public record Variable(String name) implements Expr;
public record Value(int value) implements Expr;
public record Add(Expr left, Expr right) implements Expr;
at runtime, Variable.class.getNestHost() == Expr.class
Another simpler example
nest FruitBasket;
public record Fruit(String name);
public class FruitBasket {
private final ArrayList<Fruit> fruits = new ArrayList<>();
public void add(Fruit fruit) {
Objects.requireNonNull(fruit);
fruits.add(fruit);
}
}
at runtime, Fruit.class.getNestHost() == FruitBasket.class
I believe that the nest host class defined by the keyword "nest", doesn't have
to be public, but it's not a qualified name (obviously) and the class has to be
defined in the compilation unit.
Defining a nest can be seen as an extension of the case with only one class, if
there is only one class in the compilation unit, the class is it's own nest
host.
If there is more than one class in the compilation unit, but only one class is
public, currently, they are not nestmates, i think we should not do anything to
try to retcon that compilation unit because this case is rare (one may argument
that if we introduce the nest syntax, it can be more frequent). Also the
compiler message should be tweaked if there are more than one public classes to
say that a nest can be defined.
Rémi
