On 1/16/2013 8:32 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
On 01/16/2013 05:27 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:
The primary purpose of this annotation is to *capture design
intent*. It is not required. The compiler will help you enforce the
design intent if you provide it. The compiler will not synthesize
this annotation, since that would be guessing at the design intent.
It is possible to create classfiles that subvert the design intent.
The point about other languages was simply to point out that the
universe of tools that might usefully use this design intent is
bigger than sometimes assumed.
I don't think run-time behavior should depend on optional annotations
documenting design intent (like @Override).
Supporting the discovery of functional interfaces is a good idea. But
a method like Class#isFunctionalInterface() would sever this purpose
better than an entirely optional annotation.
A method like Class#isFunctionalInterface is planned too for later in JDK 8.
-Joe
