There's about 10-15 differences between Alt-Design and HEAD (my unresearched guess), and getting us on to INT constants--the no-brainer--removes one of them. Peter hopefully will start to see more of the "theory" of Alt-Design in HEAD, if not exactly the same implementation (e.g., like Finn, I have a slight preference for a constants interface--Constants.java--that classes can implement, rather than a constants class--PropNames.java.)
Joshua Bloch, in an interview about the new features in 1.5, refers to the "Constant Interface" anti-pattern, and briefly discusses why it's not a good idea. The discussion of Typesafe Enum pattern in association with the new Typesafe enums in 1.5 may be useful in HEAD. Alt.design needs ints because I access everything to do with properties through arrays indexed by the property int constant, but that is probably not an issue in HEAD.
http://java.sun.com/features/2003/05/bloch_qa.html
Peter -- Peter B. West <http://www.powerup.com.au/~pbwest/resume.html>
