Hi Brian,
I don't think you need to mention the absolute value.
+ * file does not exist or if an I/O error occurs; the value may
+ * be negative indicating the number of milliseconds before the
epoch
Roger
On 5/22/2017 6:55 PM, Brian Burkhalter wrote:
On May 22, 2017, at 3:52 PM, Stuart Marks <stuart.ma...@oracle.com> wrote:
--- a/src/java.base/share/classes/java/io/File.java
+++ b/src/java.base/share/classes/java/io/File.java
@@ -932,7 +932,9 @@
* @return A <code>long</code> value representing the time the file was
* last modified, measured in milliseconds since the epoch
* (00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970), or <code>0L</code> if the
- * file does not exist or if an I/O error occurs
+ * file does not exist or if an I/O error occurs; the value may
+ * be negative in which case its absolute value indicates the
+ * number of milliseconds before the epoch
*
* @throws SecurityException
* If a security manager exists and its {@link
This is "absolutely" pedantic, but the absolute value of Long.MIN_VALUE is
Long.MIN_VALUE, which is still negative.
True.
A negative value for "milliseconds before the epoch" is confusing. It might be
sufficient simply to say that negative values indicate a time prior to the epoch.
Or it could say “its mathematically absolute value” which would be accurate.
This is not outside the realm of possibility. For example, the Mac HFS+ file
system represents time as seconds since January 1, 1904. It seems unlikely :-)
that any Mac files were actually created between 1904 and 1970, but it is a
possibility that somebody could have set a file's timestamp to a date in that
range.
Yes, I read about HFS Plus as part of investigating another time issue.
The weird thing here is that if this method were invoked on a file last
modified at 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970, then we would not know whether the
file does not exist or whether its last-modified time is the epoch. It seems
to me that if the file does not exist it would be better to throw a
FileNotFoundException but that is not an issue for JDK 9 at this stage of
game.
I'll comment on this on the subsequent thread.
Good!
Thanks,
Brian
