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10/15/2004: "Java 5.0: A little bit of syntactic sugar"

Fellow Agilist and expert Java programmer Mike Bowler sent me this e-mail, and I thought I'd pass it along to you folks.

One of the tricks that I know we both use when writing tests is to use Arrays.asList() to prepopulate a list.

Arrays.asList( new Object[] {"one", "two"} );

I just realized that Java 5.0 has changed the syntax of asList() to use the new varargs so now it's possible to write this instead:

Arrays.asList( "one", "two" );

Just one of those little things that makes coding more pleasant ;-)

Thanks to Mike for pointing this out. Although I'm not a fan of variable argument lists, I like the nicer code here. It's closer to PHP syntax for declaring an array, which is relatively compact. I would much prefer Ruby-style syntax for literal list values:

["one", "two"]