On Aug 26 2013, at 18:37 , Mike Duigou wrote: > > On Aug 19 2013, at 15:35 , Martin Buchholz wrote: > >> My feeling is that the JDK specs have been creeping in the direction of >> excessive pedantry and doc lawyerism. I think it's overall a benefit of >> Java that its documentation is more readable (at the cost of being a little >> less precise) than the typical ISO spec. > > There is a definite tension here. We would like to keep the documentation and > specification as readable as possible while still being sufficiently exacting > so that behaviour of an API can be correctly predicted by a reader. It goes > further than that though because Oracle employs an entire group of engineers > who examine the JDK API javadocs looking for normative statements and then > write tests to confirm that implementations conform to the API > documentation/specification. The number and quality of tests they provide to > ensure conformance has been steadily increasing (and accelerating). Is this a > good thing? To me it seems so. When I hear that people encounter problems > (other than performance) when switching among > Vector<->ArrayList<->LinkedList<->CopyOnWriteArrayList or > HashMap<->ConcurrentHashMap or TreeSet<->ConcurrentSkipListSet because of > arbitrary corner case differences between implementations I become smy
Sorry, replying to my own message to finish an incomplete sentence. ...sympathetic to concerns that the JDK docs/specs are not specific enough. Mike
