[Biojava-dev] The future of BioJava

[Richard Holland]

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Mark - I'll use your comments as the basis of a list of things that are
broken and need fixing, which I mentioned over the weekend that I would
set up. This list will expand over time I'm sure.

> With generics I am interested to know what happens when you take an
> interface that requires List and change it to require List<Symbol>
> such as.
> 
> public void foo(List l);
> 
> to
> 
> public void foo(List <Symbol> l)
> 
> Due to erasure this may not break, old code would still run, however
> old code would probably no longer compile.

Old code would still compile and run just fine, with warnings at compile
time indicating that a genericised collection has been used without
specifying the generic type. However, you wouldn't be able to pass in a
List to a method which accepts a genericised List without casting it, as
that is a compile-time error. So your foo() example above would not work.

cheers,
Richard
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