Nested Attributes in Delphi (Continued)

Question

This question refers to this prior one posted here on SO by Christian Metzler.

My only very limited experience regarding annotion consists of using CustomAttribute introduced in recent Delphi versions.

My question:

• Are there any other languages implementing nested attributes features (for annotation purpose).

Answer 1

In the Java programming language it is possible to declare nested annotation types.

Example references:

http://javahowto.blogspot.com/2006/07/java-annotations-with-no-target.html

http://www.trevorpounds.com/blog/?p=314

Here is an example from the javax.persistence.EntityResult docs, with 3 nested annotations at 3 different levels:

@SqlResultSetMapping(name="OrderResults",
 entities={
     @EntityResult(entityClass=com.acme.Order.class, fields={
         @FieldResult(name="id", column="order_id"),
         @FieldResult(name="quantity", column="order_quantity"),
         @FieldResult(name="item", column="order_item")})},
 columns={
     @ColumnResult(name="item_name")}
)