Member Literals

I am aware of the pro and cons of static and dynamic languages. I lean toward static because of my error-prone typing, IntelliJ addiction, identifier indecisiveness and unit-test laziness. All things being equal, I would rather have the compiler find my errors than write more tests (which will probably have errors and then I'll need to write a test for the test).

This is why I was excited about Scala. What I was hoping for from Scala's type system:

#1. Less intrusive than Java's type system (Scala succeeds here)

#2. Find more of my errors than Java does

For #2, Scala let me down in one area that is important to me (and i think many others). Can you find the typo in the code snippet below? If you can, then you are smarter than scala.

class Person{

var firstName:String;

var lastName:String;

//etc.

}

val rs = statement.executeQuery(

"select firstName,lastName from Person")

p.firstName = rs.getString("firstName")

p.lastName = rs.getString("lastName")

p.doSomeStuff();

val e = new XmlElement()

e.addTextElement("firtName",p.firstName)

e.addTextElement("lastName",p.lastName)

p.addPropertyChangeListener("firstName"){

txtFirstName.setText(p.firstName)

}

p.addPropertyChangeListener("lastName"){

txtLastName.setText(p.lastName)

}

I probably made 7 typos, but the one i was referring to was the "firtName" typo.

Q: Have you ever been burned by this type of error?

Q: Have you ever had the feeling that the compiler should be able help?

Q: Is it *that* hard for a compiler vendor to give a "member literal" syntax? Perhaps something like this:

e.addTextElement(Person#lastName,p.lastName)

I would actually pay money for a compiler that did that.

The only reasons i can think of that this feature does not seem to exist in Java and Scala:

1. I am the only one who wants the feature

2. Compiler writers include features that are very useful for compiler writers (Scala has a parser combinator). Kind of like the waiter who sets the thermostat for him, and doesn't notice that his customers are freezing.

3. It must be really hard to implement

By the way, I am aware that Hibernate, JAXB, Rails/Grails can address some the these issues. Also, I am aware of constants (static final), but it seems a bit silly to have code like this:

class Person{

String firstName;

public static final String FIRST_NAME = "firstName";

String lastName;

public static final String LAST_NAME = "lastName";