Addition to Comparable interface (original) (raw)

Mark Thornton mthornton at optrak.co.uk
Tue Mar 31 04:29:00 PDT 2009

Roy van Rijn wrote:

AUTHOR(S): Roy van Rijn

OVERVIEW Currently the interface Comparable only has one method: int compareTo(Object o); This is perfect and enough to work with. But the 'int' you have to return is a bit messy and unclear. FEATURE SUMMARY: The return value of the Comparable interfae could be made a lot clearer if it would have the following static variables: public static int BEFORE = -1; public static int EQUAL = 0; public static int AFTER = 1; MAJOR ADVANTAGE: Its much more clear what you need to return when you are implementing the Comparable interface. The addition won't affect any previously written code and won't break backwards compatibility.. This might give the impression that the only values returned by compareTo are -1, 0, 1 which is certainly not true. The interface only requires that the sign of the returned value reflect the ordering.

Mark Thornton

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