I have read the explanation by various members of the OpenJDK team as to why that syntax was chosen and I still don't understand it. Even Brian's explanation, w

I have read the explanation by various members of the OpenJDK team as to why that syntax was chosen and I still don't understand it. Even Brian's explanation, which otherwise gets right through to me even on more complex topics, did not really clarify it for me. He says choosing ${} would have made all the existing Strings a template if they contain ${} with a valid variable in the same scope, which breaks compatibility. But I don't know what I am missing to not see the breakage. For an existing String literal having a ${...} does not make it into a template that will be processed. You have to explicitly invoke STR. on that to process it as a template. Else if will be just like any other String with no interpolation. STR. is a completely new feature and is illegal in prior versions so I don't see how this breaks compatibility. Even if you had a variable named STR in existing code, it is illegal to do STR."some str literal". I guess it is too late now.