Thinking about @SuppressSubtypingWarning

I’m really having problems sleeping lately, so tonight I’ve been doing some thinking about @SuppressSubtypingWarning. At first, I thought I’d just bake it into the PredicateLink and Combine meta-annotations, but then it would mean that an annotation will always suppress subtyping warnings, and I don’t think that’s desired.

So the @SuppressSubtypingWarning annotation has to be a meta-annotation that gets applied to an annotation at the usage site. For example:

@SuppressSubtypingWarning @OnlyEventThread.AfterRealized
private void handleButton() {
System.out.println("Button was pushed");
final Thread ct = Thread.currentThread();
System.out.println("thread name = '" + ct.getName() + "'");
System.out.println("thread id = " + ct.getId());
System.out.println("thread grp = '" + ct.getThreadGroup().getName() + "'");
}

Unfortunately, Java’s grammar doesn’t let you apply annotations to the usage sites of other annotations, only to their definitions. So this approach isn’t going to work.

I could use a @SuppressSubtypingWarning annotation applied to a class or method to completely disable subtyping warnings for all annotations on that class or method, but I’d rather have it fine-grained. I’ll have to think some more about it.

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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