I was looking at some of the core language enhancements being considered for JDK 7. Some of them look pretty good, others, meh. Here are a few of the ones I’m looking forward to:
Constructor Inference for Generics
Using generics, your currently have to type both sides of an assignment when doing a constructor:
Map<String, List<String>> anagrams = new HashMap<String, List<String>>();
Being considered is the ability to omit the types and infer them, such as:
Map<String, List<String>> anagrams = new HashMap<>();
which would be equivalent to the first line. I like this - improves readability, loses nothing but typing.
Relational operators for Enums
Currently, the only relational operators that you can use for constants in an Enum are == and !=. Since all enums implicitly implement Comparable, theres no good reason why you should not be able to use <, >, <= and >= on enums. As it stands now, you need to explicitly invoke compareTo().
Switches on Strings
Sure would be nice if instead of if-else if-else constructs to branch on string values, you could do
switch(someString) {
case CONST_1:
return true;
case CONST_2:
return false;
default:
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Bad value: " + s);
}
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