On Apr 12 2011, at 11:11 , mark.reinh...@oracle.com wrote: > 2011/4/12 10:38 -0700, mike.dui...@oracle.com: >> On Apr 12 2011, at 03:33 , Alan Bateman wrote: >>> ... >>> >>> 2. @see Charsets.DEFAULT, I assume this should be @see >>> Charsets#DEFAULT_CHARSET >> >> Correct. I changed it to DEFAULT_CHARSET and forgot to fix this link. > > Why is forcing people to type Charsets.DEFAULT_CHARSET better than > Charsets.DEFAULT? > > If DEFAULT_CHARSET needs the _CHARSET suffix then don't the other > constants need that too? Why is DEFAULT special?
The addition of _CHARSET is to encourage static import of Charsets. Unadorned DEFAULT has too much chance of collision. The other defined names shouldn't collide. > >>> ... >>> >>> I was thinking more about DEFAULT_CHARSET and I'm not sure that we >>> really need it. In the java.io package then all constructors that take >>> a Charset also have a constructor that uses the default charset, same >>> thing in java.lang.String and java.util.zip package. In >>> javax.tools.JavaCompiler I see that null can be used to select the >>> default charset. In java.nio.file.Files then we didn't include >>> versions of readAllLines, newBufferedReader, etc. that didn't take a >>> Charset parameter. > > I tend to agree with Alan that the DEFAULT isn't really necessary. > There's already a perfectly good method for that, and invoking a method > rather than referencing a static field makes it harder for developers to > assume, incorrectly, that it's actually constant across platforms. A good point. I think consensus is currently leaning towards removing DEFAULT_CHARSET. Mike
