On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 13:41 -0700, Cédric Beust ♔ wrote:
[ . . . ]
> 
> Indeed, and he's not alone. There is a lot of misinformation going on,
> claiming that erasure was a terrible mistake. From what I've heard,
> most experts agree that it was actually a pretty sensible decision,
> both from a technical and backward compatibility standpoint. And there
> are actually very few languages that support truly reified generics.
> 

Perhaps there is a document somewhere that explains why erasure is a
good idea.  My experience is that generics using type erasure is
painful, causes people to have to use lots of hacks that should never
have to be just to get type information to runtime, and the various
different compilers still get this variously wrong at least at warning
level.

I think type erasure was an error, I would have preferred no generics to
what we have.  I agree though that few languages that claim to have
properly supported parameterized types do.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:[email protected]
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: [email protected]
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

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