[antlr-interest] anybody get bitten by ANTLR's AST interface requirement

[Martin Probst]

Hi,

> Although 'retroweaver' sounds good, I dont see how it will convert
> some stuff like the new classes for thread management (by Doug Lea).
> Also some of those new language features do take off a bit of load
> (esp the enhanced for loop). 

Well, the threading probably doesn't apply to ANTLR, and I don't see how
the enhanced for loop should be any faster, but whatever.

> Also I really dont understand why people dont want to switch to java
> 5. i mean the jvm is100% backward compatible with 1.4 plus it will run
> your 1.5 programs too.

Up until recently there was neither a 1.5 JVM for AIX nor for MacOS, and
there are those companys who rather terrorize their employees than just
let them install their JVM of choice ...

A 1.5 feature I consider quite important never gets mentioned btw:
overriding methods can now declare a subclass as the return type, e.g.
if you have "class B extends A {}" and some method "A doFoo()" you can
override it to "B doFoo()". User correctly this can significantly
enhance APIs and type safety.

Martin