In connection with this discussion it's worth making explicit what I guess everybody knows, but that sometimes seems to get a bit mixed up in conversation: that Java's support for raw types (necessary for backward compatibility with pre-generics code) doesn't really have anything much to do with type argument erasure. In a hypothetical language:
- you could have raw types without type argument erasure, or
- you could have type argument erasure without raw types.
Raw types have their own problems, of course (they're a designed-in hole in the type system). But a defense of the existence of raw types does not amount to a defense of partially reified types.
