Greg, > (1) The public Binary.BITS field is not used from anywhere. How is it > generally useful, it has no Javadoc? Should we get rid of it?
I was planning on using it later when I cleaned up this class a bit. If you're going for a release feel free to blow it away. I have not decided yet whether to leave loops unraveled and ugly or add another loop to cycle through this array. I thought it might be better to unravel it for speed. > (2) The public Binary.BIT_n fields are only used from Binary. Should > they really be public fields? Hmmm I think this might be best kept private but I do use them else where in applications that depend on Binary however perhaps incorrectly. Let me explain below. I think there really is not that much value to having these constants since people can just use hex masks on the fly. But it's proper form to make them into a constant no? I thought so and strive to write code that uses a constant every time I can regardless of data type. The question is: When is too much formality too much? Are we going to create 8 or 32 constants for each bit in a byte or in an integer? Do you think it might be going a little overboard? The array of masks on the other hand might be good to have for looping over bit ranges in bytes and integers. Another concern is whether or not codec is the place for general stuff like this. Personally I think the constants might be better off in a commons-lang class like BitField or BooleanUtils but do you want the dependency for such a small benefit. Are these constants worth it to incur the dependency? Then again is it ok for other commons projects to have a dependency on something like commons-lang which has no other dependency. To me commons-lang can be a universal dependency and get away with it. Alex --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
