On 9/10/05, Andrew John Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Forgive me if this is stating the obvious, but for anyone who doesn't > know, the third edition of the Java Language Spec. is now on-line > and includes some information on binary compatibility as regards the 1.5 > additions: > > http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/binaryComp.html
As I read this, it does mostly state the obvious in an awful lot of words ;) Basically, "as far as binary compatibility is concerned, ignore the type parameters altogether and treat uses of them as if they were the constraining type". > In terms of implementing Classpath, however, I think JAPI may need to go > beyond this, although I'm not altogether sure whether this is within its > scope of interest. Actually 1.5 is forcing japitools to re-evaluate its scope of interest. In 1.4 using the binary compatibility rules (with a few additions as noted somewhere on the japitools website) was a pretty good way to get a meaningful compatibility test. If you were binary compatible in both directions then in almost all cases you were source compatible too, even though source compatibility rules have never been written down, as far as I know, for Java. For 1.5 this is no longer true and clearly a pure binary-compatibility test is only of limited use (FWIW, that's effectively what we have now in the comparisons versus 1.5 since the 1.5 binary compat rules are in essence identical to the 1.4 rules that japi uses). I suspect that over time the precise rules that japitools uses to test for compatibility in the presence of 1.5 extensions will evolve as we learn more about what situations are really problematic or not. Once the japi results online start reflecting 1.5 features, I'll be requesting feedback on whether there's anything being reported as an error that shouldn't be, or vice versa. Stuart. -- http://sab39.dev.netreach.com/ _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath
