Re: bindings and assignments (was: Re: continuations)

[Matt Hellige <address@hidden>]

[David Herman <dherman@ccs.neu.edu>]
> > 1. What do the main Java texts/books say about this?  Do they (a)
> > emphasize its existence, (b) provide useful guidelines on its use and,
> > (c) most importantly, use it frequently in their own sample code so
> > programmers will imbibe this discipline?
> >
> > 2. Do practicing programmers use it much?  If, for instance, you were
> > to search through your own code base, or libraries from Sun, or code
> > on Alphaworks, would this appear often?  (I could search this myself,
> > except that I want only this use of final, not the one for classes,
> > and I don't have a Java parser handy to mock this up.)
> 
> This article:
> 
>      Java theory and practice: Is that your final answer?
>      http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp1029.html
> 
> suggests, unsurprisingly, that immutable fields are a relatively 
> underused feature, and not practically documented. (The most relevant 
> section is the one entitled "Final fields.") And the article doesn't 
> even mention final locals/parameters. I imagine, though I don't have 
> statistical evidence, that the requirement of declaring local variables 
> to be final in order to reference them within anonymous inner classes 
> (closures) is almost entirely unknown and unused in practice.
> 

Actually, I come up against this restriction almost every day at
work... The codebase I work on uses lots of anonymous inner classes,
though. In my experience, I'd argue that situations involving this
requirement are pretty much the only times I've ever seen much use
of "final" for locals and parameters.

Matt

-- 
Matt Hellige                  matt@immute.net
http://matt.immute.net