08.17.05

Creatures of habit

Posted in health, PL Research at 5:22 pm by James

I have been busily working on my research for the NextGen Generic Java compiler. I have spend the last couple days starting on this paper for SAC 2006. I was reviewing the list of type dependent operations supported by NextGen. In particular, I was double checking if NextGen currently handles casting correctly. I proceeded to create the following test case:

public class A {
   static class Box < T> { }
   public static void main(String[] args) {
        Box < String> s = new Box< String>();
        Box< ?> a1 = (Box< ?>) (Object)s;
        Box< Object> a2 = (Box< Object>) (Object) s;
    }
}

After executing this code, I inspected the resulting bytecode and discovered that casting was not working properly. So after some fiddling, I found the segment of code I need to modify. At the top of this section, I also found the following comment:


//TODO: cant cast Object to Box< String>
//will need to fix this case to support
//generic casts


So I’ve returned to fix a problem that I had skimmed over before, using the same basic names and types. Well I guess I like using Box< T> as an example. Still kinda funny though.

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