Hi, Dan. Those of us on the list are pretty far away from these kinds
of changes to J2SE. That said, I do have some contacts, and will try
and follow-up on this and get back to you. Your open-ended question
"are there any more incompatibilities like this that could break Derby
code?" I think implies are there any more *known* incompatibilities.
I'll try to find that out too.
David
Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
I'm wonder if any of the Sun folks on the list can help out, J2SE 5.0
has changed the behaviour of java.math.BigDecimal in incompatible ways
from JDK 1.4.x, but these are not mentioned in
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/compatibility.html
Is there any document that details all the ways J2SE 5.0's BigDecimal is
incompatible with all earlier Java releases?
While we changed Derby to address the change in behaviour of
BigDecimal.toString() a while ago, I just discovered another change that
breaks Derby and potentially other applications. The method
BigDecimal.scale() used to be
(JDK 1.4.1 javadoc)
Returns the scale of this BigDecimal. (The scale is the number of digits
to the right of the decimal point.)
but now it can return negative numbers
(J2SE 5.0 docs)
Returns the scale of this BigDecimal. If zero or positive, the scale is
the number of digits to the right of the decimal point. If negative, the
unscaled value of the number is multiplied by ten to the power of the
negation of the scale. For example, a scale of -3 means the unscaled
value is multiplied by 1000.
I discovered this when looking at Derby-225 and simple cleanup changes
that should have not fixed the issue suddenly fixed it. Further
investigation showed a scale of -302 which of course confused the
existing code.
I wonder if there are any more incompatibilities in this class that
could break Derby code?
Thanks,
Dan.
