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Comment by aeonsky | Hacker News Reader

So you want Oracle to include a "shared" and "auto" keywords and break millions of programs?

Yes, Yes I do.

And as for backward compatibility, they already did. I love the myth that java never broke backwards compatibility. Bytecode maybe (), they definitely broke syntax compatiblity.

: The various xml parsers and other library thrash really do break backwards bytecode compatiblity.

> I love the myth that java never broke backwards compatibility. Bytecode maybe (), they definitely broke syntax compatiblity.

Proof?

If by "syntax compatibility" he means code that compiles in one version does not compile is another, that's definitely true. Name collisions with the new default methods in Java 8 are one source. If your Comparator-implementing class has a method "void reverseOrder()", that will no longer compile.

Here's a couple of recent examples the Guava authors have fixed. Fortunately they were in internals and not their public API, so users won't care.

https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/source/detail?r=7d... https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/source/detail?r=25...

This happens for all languages and is not usually considered as "a language breaking backward compatibility", it's purely a library concern.

What is meant by "breaking backward compatibility" is when the grammar is altered in a way that makes existing sources no longer compile.

enum

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