Guillaume Laforge wrote:

There are many, including the core Groovy team, who see it as another language. There are many others who see it as a small extension with limited impact.

You're right, this extension would change a basic tenant of Groovy as it is today. In circumstances controlled by the programmer, they could take away the ability of anyone to change the semantics of certain objects or pieces of code. The idea is that they'd use this in cases where they don't want those kinds of dynamic behaviour anyway. After all, you lose that (and a tonne of other stuff!) when you rewrite in Java. So there are certainly times when you don't miss it.

I see this as an interesting extension, the ability to turn something off when you don't need it. I don't really understand your use of the emotional term "betraying." Is it really so important to have the ability to do dynamic things always, even when you don't want to do them? To me, it wouldn't be a fundamental change to Groovy to be able to tell the compiler "Thanks for all those nifty features, but in this one situation, I'm not using that one particular feature." I have a hard time understanding your argument as more than "being as dynamic as possible is always good no matter what." You've brought up some valid points, such as overuse of the feature leading to ugly (and therefore harder to read, understand and maintain) code. I think doing some experiments would help understand how this would be used and abused. That's really all I'm saying.

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