On 13/01/2011 22:11, Brian Goetz wrote:
<rathole>
I disagree with Tom here. We have *already* made the billion dollar
mistake, and we can't eliminate that headache (but we can provide easier
access to aspirin.) Java developers are *constantly* writing methods
like the suggested carpet-sweeping nonNull() to work around this (and
some of the Objects methods already do this, like hashCode()). If I had
to guess how many times this exact method had been written across all
the Java code in the world, I would be quite surprised if its common
logarithm were less than 4.
If you come across developers abusing null to represent empty, the
appropriate thing to do is point them in the direction of Items 38 and
43. Java used to offer [some] technical leadership.
The two categories of methods in Objects kind of demonstrates the
dumping ground nature of utilities classes. Perhaps the class should be
split, and given actually meaningful names.
IMO, the name nonNull is perfect in the extremely common context.
this.donkey = nonNull(donkey);
It's a statement about the expression. Method names don't generally say
what they are going to do if passed illegal values. You could imagine
other constraints expressed similarly.
Tom
