PROPOSAL: Equivalence operators (formerly titled

[Derek Foster]

Hi, Mark.

Thanks for your comments.

The proposal already does what you suggest, although I agree it is not clear from the section you quoted (which was only intended to be a brief feature summary). If you look in the specification section, you will find that in a case like "a < b" where a is Float and b is float, that since both types are convertible to a primitive type, that this conversion will be done before the operation is attempted (possibly triggering a NullPointerException on unboxing), yielding the same results as would occur in Java now.

In some ways, I think it would be nice to have the ># and <# operators return true if both of their operands are null, even if both operands are typed as boxed primitives. This would be more similar to how ## and !# work and would be consistent for all operators if you assume that null "is equivalent to" null. I am considering changing the proposal to allow this. (Currently this operation would provoke a NullPointerException during unboxing, according to proposal version 3 and before). < and > would not be affected by this, of course. Comments?

Derek

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Thornton <mthornton at optrak.co.uk>
>Sent: May 8, 2009 3:05 AM
>To: Derek Foster <vapor1 at teleport.com>
>Cc: Project Coin <coin-dev at openjdk.java.net>
>Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: Equivalence operators (formerly titled "Sameness	operators") (Version 3)
>
>Derek Foster wrote:
>> and adds additional overloadings to existing operators:
>> a < b     a.compareTo(b) < 0, or a < b for primitive types.
>>
>>   
>If 'a' is Float (or Double) and 'b' is float (double), then you have to 
>unbox 'a' to apply the primitive comparison and not box 'b' and apply 
>.compareTo. Boxing 'b' to apply compareTo would be a breaking change.
>
>Mark Thornton