Why collection literals?

Question

From the various online articles on Java 7 I have come to know that Java 7 will be having collection literals¹ like the following:

List

        

Answer 1

Language design is a matter of taste. Having said that, this kind of list/object initialization has become very popular. For example, C# has almost the same thing. The syntax is quite flexible and, as even your examples show, lets you initialize something like a dictionary inline. I rather like the syntax the designers chose here.