Addition to Comparable interface (original) (raw)

Mark Thornton mthornton at optrak.co.uk
Tue Mar 31 05:31:44 PDT 2009

Roy van Rijn wrote:

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; 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. That might be a problem indeed, but the javadoc should still indicate its possible to use any positive and negative integer value. The problem I've seen a lot is the following, even in large corporate programs, when people compare integers like this: It is valid for reduced ranges of integers, notably when the values are known to be positive.

Mark Thornton

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