Github user kaspersorensen commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/metamodel/pull/77#issuecomment-163878583
My worry with the -1 is that someone might do math operations on this - for
instance if they perform a series of updates on a DataContext and then want to
present a sum of all the inserts, all the updates, all the deletions etc. In
such a case we might easily expose them to a bug where they put -1 into their
sum. I guess the alternative will null is that they will get a
NullPointerException and then realize that they couldn't always rely on the
value being set. Which is IMO slightly better. Optional would be preferable for
sure tho'!
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