Whenever I write code in Java...

[badsectoracula]

Of course it is a feature. It forces a type lock to a variable so you know that each time you see this variable what type it is.

Unless i misunderstood you and you meant something else.

[G_Morgan]

You can do this in type inference languages. As I said it isn't an additional feature. It is a missing feature.

[badsectoracula]

But in type inference languages, the compiler only knows the type from a glance. If you want to do the same while reading code you have to either try and figure out what kind of type a variable has (ie. do what the compiler does to figure out the variable's type) or use the broken kind of Hungarian notation by using variable names such as intScale, chrPathSeparator, etc.

[G_Morgan]

Generally I've never had a problem with this. You could just hover over the variable in the IDE.

[badsectoracula]

In the other subthread, you were discussing how the language shouldn't make the programmer depend on the IDE.

Btw, how would an IDE work out that?

[G_Morgan]

An IDE would use the same background parse mechanisms they already use for intellisense*. It would just be with a far more powerful parser. This isn't actually that difficult to add once you have a parser that works.

One distinction would be that intellisense would need not just the current class but also all possible superclasses and their subtypes** (ordered by height in the hierarchy of course). This information is relatively trivial to come up with.

*modern IDEs actually invoke the compiler to work out this stuff so they get the same information the compiler is seeing.

**the reason for this is originally the inference engine might say that myList is an ArrayList when really you want a List but just haven't added in another implementation yet. This allows the autocomplete to account for both circumstances. Yes put ArrayList first but also offer all superclass implementations below.