Addition to Comparable interface (original) (raw)

Joseph D. Darcy Joe.Darcy at Sun.COM
Tue Mar 31 08:40:57 PDT 2009

Mark Thornton wrote:

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: As Reinier points out this is the wrong list for this proposal. However a better solution might be to add Integer.compare(int,int) and Long.compare(int, int) methods, and encourage people to use tham inside of writing the comparison themselves. Mark Thornton

Yes; as noted the request is off-topic for Project Coin since it is a pure libraries change.

I agree a set of two-argument int and long (and float and double ...) compare methods on primitive types would be a fine addition to the platform libraries in JDK 7:

6582946 Add suite of compare(T, T) methods for ints, longs etc http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6582946

-Joe

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