[Proposal]

[Sean Fritz]

In article <e7346j$1uo9$2 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>
>Sean Fritz wrote:
>>> T sqr(T) ( T x )
>>> {
>>>     return x*x;
>>> }
>> 
>> Is the way Java Generics do it,
>
>I didn't think Java supported function templates (only class templates).

Yes, there are class and method level generics.  There are none of the linking
issues that come up from function templates (thank gods!).

Class generics are (of course):

class Foo<T> {  ... }

While method generics are:

public void <T> T[] toArray(T[] arr) { ... }

The distinction in placment of the type parameter is one of the weirdest
syntactical choices in Java.  It doesn't take long to master, but it constantly
leaves you wondering why they did it.

Also, they aren't really anything like templates except that they allow generic
programming.  It really takes several months to fully grok generics (especially
with the Java Language Spec being the only decent reference at the moment).

Sean