eliminate gcjh?

Tue Mar 9 14:44:00 GMT 2004

Per Bothner wrote:
> Christian Stuellenberg wrote:
>>> If I remind right, [coverant returns]
>> is "only" at language level, since they
>> did not want to change the VM (to stay compatible e.g.).
...
>> 1.5 does
>> only translation of some syntactic sugar to other valid java code on
>> the fly I think...
>>> Well, I'm sure it it doesn't translate to "other java code". And
> it most definitely generates .class files you could not create with
> earlier versions.
>> sf wrote:
> > Covariance has always existed at bytecode level. See also
> > http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9861 .
>> I'd rather say "support for covariance in the sense of overloading based
> on return type" as always existed. Covariance implies that the method
> with the changed return types overrides the method in the base class;
> in the bytecode they are completely unrelated.

If you put it this way you are right. Overloading, based on return type 
as well as parameter type, is part of a language specification at a 
higher level. The Java language supports one but not the other.
So until 1.5, covariant methods just never occured at the bytecode level 
when compiling java programs.
Regards
	Stephan