Hi Jeff, > It may not be completely obvious what is going on here
Congratulations, you win "understatement of the day". :-) And that's my point. The purpose of a JavaDoc comment is to make it so people CAN understand what's going on. Those "comments" say nothing. They don't say "this is a locale dependent format, go <here> to figure out what that format will be in your locale", they don't say ANYTHING. > that format changes based on the locale If that format changes with the locale, why am I getting an entirely non-US format? > While it probably makes sense to you to put the format into US standards, it > would totally trip up people writing GWT in french or some other standard. If it's locale dependent, then, since I'm writing in a US locale, that's what I should be seeing. If it's not locale dependent, I don't see why defaulting to a non-US representation is better than defaulting to a US one. > The short answer is, it isn't a useless javadoc comment, it is a > non-existent comment. Well, I don't know how anyone else codes, but from my perspective, an undocumented constant in a library is a useless constant, since the amount of time and effort spent figuring out what it is and what it does could better be spent just making my own constant that does what I want. Which is what I've now done in this case. > As always, you're welcome to submit a patch with javadoc. Well, my understanding is that I can't do that w/o writing to the GWT "Coding Standards". They require you to write hideously ugly code, and I only do that when someone pays me, extra. So I don't foresee myself ever writing anything for GWT. Aside from that, I'd have to spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out what each of those constants MEAN. Presumably the person / people who wrote those comments did that in the first place. Which leaves me with the question of why they didn't write that information down, instead of writing down that some day they needed to do that? And the other question of why the GWT Team allowed them to submit the code when it was so obviously incomplete. Yes, I know that there's a lot of volunteer labor that goes into GWT. But I would expect that the pride and professionalism of all involved would demand that things be done right, or not at all. Greg On May 16, 1:12 pm, Jeff Larsen <[email protected]> wrote: > It may not be completely obvious what is going on here, but that format > changes based on the locale, so it isn't exactly easy or maintainable to > actually specify what each format is doing for each locale. > > While it probably makes sense to you to put the format into US standards, it > would totally trip up people writing GWT in french or someother standard. > > While this does add to the complexity, it also removes problems of if you're > writing an i18n application, you can just use datetimeformat and get the > desired results in the formats that you want. > > Also, if you look at the code, there is a TODO there to get the formats > documented. So they are already aware that they need documentation. > > The short answer is, it isn't a useless javadoc comment, it is a > non-existent comment. > > As always, you're welcome to submit a patch with javadoc. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
