Re: GEP-16: val keyword for final declarations

That's a good idea!
And it'll be familiar to developers coming from those other languages as
well.

On Sun, Apr 12, 2026 at 2:00 PM Paul King <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> We have been asked numerous times about the possibility of having a "val"
> keyword to match Kotlin and Scala. We also have had a related Jira open for
> more than 6 years. So I created a GEP to help frame a discussion about what
> would be involved and help us make a decision:
>
> https://groovy.apache.org/wiki/GEP-16.html
>
> I know we have "final", but many developers I speak to from the Kotlin and
> Scala worlds are big fans of "val" and believe it was the right name to use
> for those two languages.
>
> Given that it involves changes to only about 15 lines of production Groovy
> code and has well-identified impacts (arguably edge cases with
> workarounds), I am largely in favor of this proposal, but I am keen to hear
> other's thoughts.
>
> Cheers, Paul.
>
>
>

-- 
*Guillaume Laforge*
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