Besides methods,
you can also annotate other declarations.
These annotations need not affect a program's semantics.
Instead,
tools can read these annotations and process them.
Javadoc comments and the @deprecated tag
could now be replaced.
In some situations, you need to provide
stylised Java source code,
code that always takes a particular form.
By introducing an annotation, you could shorten
the amount of code you write and get a tool
to generate the real Java source code for you from
your template.
The Java 5 release provides
such a tool:
it is called apt.