RFR [8014066] Mistake in documentation of ArrayList#removeRange (original) (raw)

Ivan Gerasimov ivan.gerasimov at oracle.com
Fri Mar 14 16:22:56 UTC 2014

On 14.03.2014 18:18, Peter Levart wrote:

On 03/14/2014 01:14 PM, Ivan Gerasimov wrote:

On 14.03.2014 16:02, David Holmes wrote: Ivan,

On 14/03/2014 9:19 PM, Ivan Gerasimov wrote: Thanks Peter for the comments.

On 14.03.2014 14:53, Peter Levart wrote: On 03/14/2014 08:05 AM, Ivan Gerasimov wrote: One thing I noticed is that some methods I mentioned above (List.subList(), Arrays.sort(), etc) throw IllegalArgumentException when fromIndex > toIndex, not IndexOutOfBoundException. Wouldn't it be more correct to adopt this into removeRange() too?

The question is, what exception should be thrown for removeRange(0, -1) then... The order of checks matters and should be specified if two kinds of exceptions are thrown...

In my opinion, the order of the checks should match the order of the listed exceptions in the spec. That's a nice proposal but unfortunately there has never been a rule that you have to document exceptions in the order you expect them to be checked; nor do you have to implement exception checks in the order they are documented. So it is too late to try and enforce this now. Sigh. The order can still be stated explicitly in the doc, if it's decided to throw IllegalArgumentException. Or the checks could be documented in a way that they have disjunctive conditions so that the order doesn't matter: @throws IndexOutOfBoundException if either index is negative or either index is greater than size() @throws IllegalArgumentException if (fromIndex > toIndex) and neither index is negative nor greater than size() Yes, this is the most clear way!

Sincerely yours, Ivan

Regards, Peter

And, of course, there's no such problem if IndexOutOfBoundException is the only exception thrown.

Sincerely yours, Ivan

David ----- If the order is: @throws IndexOutOfBoundException if either index is negative or either index is greater than size() @throws IllegalArgumentException if (fromIndex > toIndex)

then removeRange(0, -1) should throw IndexOutOfBoundException. Sincerely yours, Ivan

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