Marshall Schor wrote:
I'll probably stop trying to convince others if they continue to feel
that the tradeoffs here should be in the direction of returning only
specific types (disallowing users from specifying downcasting in that
manner), versus using types of the form T extends X,
which allows users to specify downcasting.
The case of FSIndexRepository is maybe more clear
then the other cases in our API.
With down casting it could be changed to
interface FSIndexRepository {
<T extends FeatureStructure> FSIndex<T> getIndex(String label);
<T extends FeatureStructure> FSIterator<T> getAllIndexedFS(Type aType);
...
}
and then a user could write
FSIndex<AnnotationFS> index = repo.getIndex(...);
FSIterator<AnnotationFS> it = repo.getAllIndexedFS(...);
Jörn
