I've recently adopted the practice of adding inline comments to Collections, Maps, etc., to indicate what types they contain: List /* <String> */ getEmailAddresses(), Map /* <String -> Object> */ getParameters(), etc.
I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the proposed java generics spec/implementation, but I would like to discuss what Idea could do to support this. What would it take to augment Idea's internal typing rules to track the contained types? What could Idea do with this knowledge that would help you write better code? I was trying to answer this question, but I guess it really depends on what can easily be implemented. At the one end of the spectrum is full support for generics (well, at least as full as the upcoming generics spec allows) - Idea could give me errors or warnings if I try to pull a Number out of a List /* <String> */, or if I pass a List /* <Object> */ to a method that expects List /* <Foo> */. At the other end of the spectrum is nothing at all (and I'm extremely happy with Idea right now, with nothing at all in terms of generics support). Somewhere inbetween is the ability for Idea to guess the contained type based on comments like these, or built-in support for the "gj" java compiler (is this still around/maintained?). Does/could the open API expose enough of the information about the code to facilitate a useful plugin here? What would the plugin do? mike _______________________________________________ Eap-features mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.jetbrains.com/mailman/listinfo/eap-features
