> with type inference though That is what I was trying to get at - with type inference, one can omit many of the type declarations (thus getting more flexibili

> with type inference though That is what I was trying to get at - with type inference, one can omit many of the type declarations (thus getting more flexibility and shorter code) without sacrificing type safety. Whether or not it is a good idea to omit type declaration is a different question, but in cases like "T a = new T(...)", the type declaration on the variable is kind of redundant anyway.