> Do you have evidence for the "because"? I agree that erasure is a sound approach for type system representation when designing a language, but I thought that

> Do you have evidence for the "because"? I agree that erasure is a sound approach for type system representation when designing a language, but I thought that backwards compatibility was explicitly a concern in the case of Java. When the debate was raging around 2004 when generics were being discussed, Neal Gafter offered a proposal of a reified JVM that would maintain backward compatibility. Erasure was ultimately chosen over that proposal. Backward compatibility was not the issue: technical soundness was.