[japitools] more generic evilness - is this legal?

[Stuart Ballard]

I hope people don't mind me using this list for japitools discussion -
I think it's relevant to Claspath as the primary consumer of the
results...

Anyway, I found another evil case that javac accepts and I'm wondering
if any of the experts on the JLS can tell me whether this is
*supposed* to be acceptable...

class Outer<T> {
  class Inner<U> {
  }
  class InnerTester extends Inner {
  }
  public InnerTester getIt() { return new InnerTester(); }
}
public class Tester2 {
  public static Outer<String>.InnerTester getIt() {
    return new Outer<String>().getIt();
  }
  // Fails to compile because Inner is "half-bound"
  // But for some reason InnerTester is okay even though it results in
  // Inner being equally half-bound.
  //public static Outer<String>.Inner getIt2() {
  //  return new Outer<String>().getIt();
  //}
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println(getIt());
  }
}

The bit that fails to compile is obvious - you can't have
Outer<String>.Inner because T is bound but U is not. However, I can't
understand why InnerTester is legal, because it's in exactly the same
boat - in fact, it's superclass *is* Outer<String>.Inner.

The rules as I understood them were that you could have a raw type,
with all generic parameters omitted, or a fully-qualified type with
all the parameters specified, but specifying some but not all was
illegal. This appears to be an exception to that rule?

It gets worse...
  class Inner<U> {
    class InnerInner<V> {}
  }
  class InnerTester extends Inner {
    InnerInner<String> foo;
  }

Now InnerInner has T bound, U unbound and V bound - there's a hole in
the *middle* of the list of parameters. Is this *really* supposed to
be legal?

Stuart.
-- 
http://sab39.dev.netreach.com/