The scope of CR 4504839 doesn't cover broader changes to APIs, so
the suggestion to upgrade String to CharSequence should be a separate CR
to be examined and reviewed separately.
The new (and some old) NumberFormatExceptions contain English text
preformatted with arguments. From an I18n localization view, that's
hard to localize.
A fixed string, though less informative could be localized more easily.
On 01/19/2012 10:49 AM, Ulf Zibis wrote:
Am 18.01.2012 22:20, schrieb Roger Riggs:
On 01/18/2012 03:09 PM, Joe Darcy wrote:
1. In the new parsing methods, could the String arguments be
changed to the more general
java.lang.CharSequence? For many parsing applications, it could be
more convenient
to pass a CharSequence than to create a new String.
I don't think that would be very helpful in this case. If the
methods were changed to take a CharSequence, the first action I'd
write in the method would be to call toString on the argument; this
is necessary to guard against the class of
time-of-check-versus-time-of-use problems because the CharSequence
objects can be mutable.
Though the existing methods do operate on immutable inputs, there is no
expectation of synchronization provided by the parsing methods of
Integer, etc.
Making the change would not break any existing code because it
continues to pass
immutable inputs.
New code that calls the methods using CharSequences, in full
knowledge of the
mutability of CharSequences, would manage or avoid the concurrency
issues,
most likely by keeping the computation to a single thread or
otherwise synchronizing
changes to the object that implement CharSequence.
Since Integer makes no assurances about being multi-thread safe it
can operate
under those assumptions and does not need to make copies of the
arguments.
In any case, the copy operation itself could run afoul of concurrency
faults, and it
doesn't matter where the copy occurs, inside or outside of the
Integer methods.
Please consider the necessity of extra steps by the developer (to
produce strings)
and the potential savings in the load on the heap by not creating
copies of strings.
Roger
+1
-Ulf
