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From: Eric Sosman <esosman@comcast-dot-net.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: Usefulness of "final" (Was: Re: Inserting In a List)
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:41:00 -0400
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On 4/2/2013 3:06 PM, Robert Klemme wrote:
>[...]
> I believe in using "final" pretty often as it will immediately indicate
> which local variables are constant for a method call and which are
> modified all the time. [...]

     De gustibus non disputandum est, but I think "final" should
be reserved for things that *mustn't* change, and shouldn't just
be pasted on to anything that happens to remain constant in the
code's current incarnation.  When considering a change to some
code I might see

	Thing thing = getThing();
	// ... code that doesn't happen to change `thing'

or I might see

	final Thing thing = getThing();
	// ... code that (obviously) doesn't change `thing'

In the first case I might think about inserting, say,

	if (thing == null)
	    thing = fallbackThing();

... while in the second case I wouldn't even consider it: I
would suppose that the code relied on `thing' being exactly
what getThing() had returned, perhaps in some way and for some
reason not clear to me.

     But, as I said above, de gustibus.

> Generally I find "finally" quite useful - apparently significantly more
> useful than you do. :-)

     "finally" is a Godsend -- but did you mean "final"?

-- 
Eric Sosman
esosman@comcast-dot-net.invalid