Brother Ted has written about the dangers of language-level trickery.
I think he is spot on. Although I understand that Sun is really anal when it comes to changing the VM in any way (I mean god forbid we add an opcode), it is short sited in many ways.
It shows that Sun thinks there is The One True Language. With that mentality, they can put more intelligence into the javac side of the house. They probably laugh about how sneaky this is.
However, not only can other languages on top of the Java Platform (it is a platform!) do whatever they damn want… but what about other java compilers? Will jikes run all of the same checks?
Generics is definitely one of the poster children here. We have ended up with erasure. There is no way to know that the code was using Generics as soon as you compile them. List
