On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Patrick Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Could you explain the "even more immutable" part of your mail ?
Sure.
Properties are not immutable at all if you use Ant's Java API. It's
just that (almost[1]) all of the built-in Ant tasks refuse to change
the value of an existing property. But it is trivial to write a task
that changes the value of a property and in fact a lot of people and
projects have done so.
There are five property setting methods in Ant's Project class:
setNewProperty - sets a property, will never override an
existing one - user property or not.
Used by almost all built-in Ant tasks.
setProperty - sets or overrides a property, will never override
a user property. Used by <available>.
setPropertyInternal - same as setProperty but without any warning if
it overrides a property.
setUserProperty - sets or overrides a user property. Used when
parsing the command line.
setInheritedProperty - sets or overrides a user property. Used for
<property> nested in Ant.
So both "plain properties" and "user properties" are in fact mutable
if you use the Ant API. Only one of the five setter methods will not
overwrite an existing property, only two of them will overwrite an
existing user property - which makes user properties "more immutable".
Stefan
Footnotes:
[1] Since I know I'll have to explain the "almost", <available> will
happily overwrite existing properties.
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