/*
* Copyright (c) 2005, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
* DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.
*
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* under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as
* published by the Free Software Foundation. Oracle designates this
* particular file as subject to the "Classpath" exception as provided
* by Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.
*
* This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
* ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
* version 2 for more details (a copy is included in the LICENSE file that
* accompanied this code).
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License version
* 2 along with this work; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
* Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
*
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package javax.lang.model.element;
import java.util.List;
import javax.lang.model.type.TypeMirror;
/**
* A visitor of the values of annotation type elements, using a
* variant of the visitor design pattern. Unlike a standard visitor
* which dispatches based on the concrete type of a member of a type
* hierarchy, this visitor dispatches based on the type of data
* stored; there are no distinct subclasses for storing, for example,
* {@code boolean} values versus {@code int} values. Classes
* implementing this interface are used to operate on a value when the
* type of that value is unknown at compile time. When a visitor is
* passed to a value's {@link AnnotationValue#accept accept} method,
* the visitXYZ
method applicable to that value is
* invoked.
*
*
Classes implementing this interface may or may not throw a * {@code NullPointerException} if the additional parameter {@code p} * is {@code null}; see documentation of the implementing class for * details. * *
WARNING: It is possible that methods will be added to * this interface to accommodate new, currently unknown, language * structures added to future versions of the Java™ programming * language. Therefore, visitor classes directly implementing this * interface may be source incompatible with future versions of the * platform. To avoid this source incompatibility, visitor * implementations are encouraged to instead extend the appropriate * abstract visitor class that implements this interface. However, an * API should generally use this visitor interface as the type for * parameters, return type, etc. rather than one of the abstract * classes. * *
Note that methods to accommodate new language constructs could
* be added in a source compatible way if they were added as
* default methods. However, default methods are only
* available on Java SE 8 and higher releases and the {@code
* javax.lang.model.*} packages bundled in Java SE 8 are required to
* also be runnable on Java SE 7. Therefore, default methods
* cannot be used when extending {@code javax.lang.model.*}
* to cover Java SE 8 language features. However, default methods may
* be used in subsequent revisions of the {@code javax.lang.model.*}
* packages that are only required to run on Java SE 8 and higher
* platform versions.
*
* @param the type of the additional parameter to this visitor's methods.
* @author Joseph D. Darcy
* @author Scott Seligman
* @author Peter von der Ahé
* @since 1.6
*/
public interface AnnotationValueVisitor