4 ms·

Wow that's a real pain point. Why would they even do that, is there a use case?

• ZoFreX 12y ago
  Backward compatibility - you could run an application that uses generics, introduced in Java 1.5, on a Java 1.4 VM. At the time that was pretty amazing. These days, with so many backward compatibility-breaking changes being introduced, it doesn't feel so great.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • mcculley 12y ago
    That was the original plan, but it never worked in my experience. The compiler as shipped required that -source 1.5 use -target 1.5. So hobbling the language this way served no benefit in the end.
• im3w1l 12y ago
  In my opinion, no it really isn't. You can just create a method with a different name or a static constructing method if you need to overload constructors. The major pain point with generics is that they don't work with primitives.
• tomp 12y ago
  Btw, type erasure is only a problem for Java because it supports runtime type information (which is incomplete, because of type erasure), and overloading (which I have no idea why the compiler can't handle). For languages like ML and Haskell, type erasure is no problem, because you can't access the types at runtime anyways.