Javapolis whiteboards on Java language changes

At Javapolis I 'looked after' a set of whiteboards on which all 2800+ participants were free to write up their ideas for improving their Java lives.

These were photographed at the end, and I've now extracted the information into textual format. So, if you were at Javapolis, or even if you weren't, you can see what was on the collective mind here.

As you look through them, you'll note that there were a few indicative votes taken. It appeared that developers liked the idea of closures and solving some issues with NPEs, but weren't so fussed about improving the foreach loop. There was also a vote about native XML, which showed a majority against the feature at present.

enum + switch == NPE

Enums hide most of their implementation successfully from the developer., You just use them as constants, assign them to fields, call methods on them, no real issues and no exposed implementation details. However, they do fail on at least one count - a NullPointerException in switch statements.

When enums were introduced, the compiler was extended to support enums in switch statements. Consider an enum of traffic lights (RED, YELLOW, GREEN):

public enum TrafficLight {RED, YELLOW, GREEN}

TrafficLight trafficLights = ...
switch (trafficLights) {
  case RED: {/* do stuff */}
  case YELLOW: {/* do stuff */}
  case GREEN: {/* do stuff */}
}

This code can throw a NullPointerException on the first line. How? Well, take a look at how the compiler sees it:

switch (trafficLights.ordinal()) {
  case 0: {/* do stuff */}
  case 1: {/* do stuff */}
  case 2: {/* do stuff */}
}

Now its clear whats going on. The enum switch statement is just syntax sugar for a regular switch statement. But in order to get the ordinal for the switch, a method is called, and that method call will throw an NPE if trafficLights is null.

Can we solve this issue? Well, yes! Since this is just syntax sugar already, why not extend the sugar to allow us to avoid the NPE? This can be achieved by allowing a "case null" within the sugared enum switch statement:

switch (trafficLights) {
  case RED: {/* do stuff */}
  case YELLOW: {/* do stuff */}
  case GREEN: {/* do stuff */}
  case null: {/* do stuff */}  // the null case
}

which compiles to:

switch (trafficLights != null) ? trafficLights.ordinal() : -1) {
  case 0: {/* do stuff */}
  case 1: {/* do stuff */}
  case 2: {/* do stuff */}
  case -1 {/* do stuff */}  // the null case
}

Its a simple extension, but it closes a gap in the enum syntax sugar. Perhaps one for Java SE 7?