Fix Issue 18628 by refixing Issue 18468

editor/tools/plugins/com.google.dart.engine/src/com/google/dart/engine/internal/resolver/StaticTypeAnalyzer.java

Index: editor/tools/plugins/com.google.dart.engine/src/com/google/dart/engine/internal/resolver/StaticTypeAnalyzer.java
diff --git a/editor/tools/plugins/com.google.dart.engine/src/com/google/dart/engine/internal/resolver/StaticTypeAnalyzer.java b/editor/tools/plugins/com.google.dart.engine/src/com/google/dart/engine/internal/resolver/StaticTypeAnalyzer.java
index 9c348d57152d002d3897c2443d240258a3f30764..8d0f8eeea4332762f116c232e6e282a61a2f76a0 100644
--- a/editor/tools/plugins/com.google.dart.engine/src/com/google/dart/engine/internal/resolver/StaticTypeAnalyzer.java
+++ b/editor/tools/plugins/com.google.dart.engine/src/com/google/dart/engine/internal/resolver/StaticTypeAnalyzer.java
@@ -1270,11 +1270,7 @@ public class StaticTypeAnalyzer extends SimpleAstVisitor<Void> {
     } else if (element instanceof ExecutableElement) {
       staticType = ((ExecutableElement) element).getType();
     } else if (element instanceof TypeParameterElement) {
-//      if (isTypeName(node)) {
-      staticType = ((TypeParameterElement) element).getType();
-//      } else {
-//        type = typeProvider.getTypeType());
-//      }
+      staticType = typeProvider.getTypeType();

[Brian Wilkerson, 2014/08/27 07:42:41]

This seems like a very drastic change, and I'm surprised that the tests don't
break. I know that we had a reason for making this change, but I can't think at
the moment what that reason was. I'm a bit concerned that this will cause other
problems, but I'll eave it to you to decide how to proceed.

[Nathan Collins, 2014/08/27 17:42:33]

Can you explain why this *is not* the obvious solution? What's "drastic" about
it?

I'll explain why I think it *is* the obvious solution: a type parameter stands
for a type, and a type in an expression context should intuitively have type
[Type] (the type of types).

Note: the spec does not -- that I can find anyway -- directly say that all types
evaluate to instances of [Type], but it does say that

- [x.runtimeType] is an instance of [Type] for all [x]
- [int], [String], [bool], and [double] evaluate to an instance of [Type]
- [x.runtimeType] on an [int] literal ([String], [bool], or [double],
respectively) returns the [Type] instance which is the value of [int] ([String],
[bool], or [double], respectively)
the [Type] instance which is the value of [int]

and these are special cases of the general intuition above.

Let's ask @karlklose and @gbracha what they think.

[karlklose, 2014/08/28 06:54:38]

As I pointed out in the review of the original change, this is the right thing
to do and the previous change was incorrect.

[Element.getType] looks like a overly generic method that easily leads to
confusion. We had the same problem in dart2js (in particular with generic types)
and decided to deprecate it and require to call a special method (rawType,
thisType, functionType, bound).

[Nathan Collins, 2014/08/28 22:23:17]

I don't understand what the "special method (rawType, thisType, functionType,
bound)" does here.

[karlklose, 2014/08/29 08:01:09]

The code you replaced referred to the "type of the element". I wanted to point
out that this is easy to misuse, so it may be better to get rid of getType and
have specific getters for the kind of element (for example, getBound for the
type variable).

     } else if (element instanceof VariableElement) {
       VariableElement variable = (VariableElement) element;
       staticType = promoteManager.getStaticType(variable);