Review: JDK 8 CR for Support Integer overflow (original) (raw)

Stephen Colebourne scolebourne at joda.org
Mon Feb 6 22:35:55 UTC 2012

On 6 February 2012 21:16, Roger Riggs <Roger.Riggs at oracle.com> wrote:

 * Removed the negateExact methods since they don't pull their weight in the API, simple tests for MINVALUE and MAXVALUE can be done by the developer more efficiently.

Sorry, but I can't agree with this. Developers get negation of numbers wrong all the time by ignoring the special case. Its a big source of hidden bugs. Increment/decrement are replaceable by add/subtract (with less readability), but negate is not.

The whole purpose of methods like this is not to say "oh they're easy for the caller to write", but to write it once accurately, well-tested, and with clear intent for code readers. Look at the methods on Objects to see that complexity of the implementation is not the deciding factor.

Many, many developers will thank you for having negate, increment and decrement.

Stephen

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