On Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:14:19 +0100, Luc Maisonobe wrote:
Le 29/10/2013 15:00, Gilles a écrit :
Hello.
Hi Gilles,
While working on MATH-1047, I wondered about the usefulness of those
two methods. Excluding the trivial case (base=|1|), the result will
overflow as soon as the exponent is larger than 31, when base=|2|,
and sooner the larger the base.
Hence, the methods amount to syntactic sugar to spare a cast from
a "long" to an "int" exponent.
IMO, this is not worth the number of source code lines.
Unless there is an objection, I propose to deprecate those methods
in 3.3 and remove them in 4.0.
There were three main reasons for this method :
- in many cases, very low (and fixed) exponents are often
encountered
(say exponents up to half a dozen or so),
- computation with long in Java bytecode is not done the same way as
int because it needs two successive variable slots and requires
successive memory loading, and thus is slower (of course, this
effect
disappears when the JIT compiler converts everything to native
code
if the processor is 64 bits),
- forcing the user to add a cast clutters the code.
As always, your mileage may vary.
I must be missing something (sorry!): I propose to remove the methods
were
the exponent is a "long", and as I understand it, you give reasons for
doing
so:
1. Why would one want/need to use a "long" for a _small_ value?
2. Moreover you say that using a "long" is slower; thus, a second
reason for
not calling those methods.
3. A cast would only be necessary if the user chooses to use a "long"
anyway,
even if it is neither necessary (cf 1.) nor desirable (cf. 2.).
Best,
Gilles
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