Re: Possible New Groovy Features... - Deduce the type of final fields from their assigned value

[MG]

Hi Paul,

On 21.08.2017 04:30, Paul King wrote:
Deduce the type of final fields from their assigned value:
    class Foo {
    final device = new PrinterDevice(...) // device field will have
    type PrinterDevice instead of Object when reflection is used on
    class Foo
    }
    Rationale: While IntelliJ does a good job at deducing the type of
    final fields, it would still be better if the Groovy language
    itself would use the more specialized type here, for e.g.
    reflection purposes

With @Typechecked or @CompileStatic type inferencing is going to be in 
play. During debugging the runtime type is going to be available. What 
"reflective purposes" did you have in mind?

In my framework I iterate over the fields of classes, which are of type 
Object, if the have been defined in a compact way using just final, 
without an explicit type - it would be helpful to have the type here.
And in general it just feels like a lost opportunity that final 
fields/variables do not auto get the type of their assigned value - 
having more information available is never bad.
Of course I am talking about this naively from a user's perspective: Do 
you think adding this would a) be hard / time intensive (naively I would 
have thought no), b) break backwards comptability (since the final 
variable/field cannot be reassigned... (?))...

Cheers,
Markus