timsort

[Christopher Hegarty -Sun Microsystems Ireland]

Martin Buchholz wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 07:35, Christopher Hegarty -Sun Microsystems Ireland
> 
> 
> 
>            2) With the addition of @throws IllegalArgumentException, this
>              condition cannot be met with the old merge sort right, i.e.
>         running
>              with -Djava.util.Arrays.useLegacyMergeSort=true. So we're
>         saying
>              that all bets are off when running with this property set?
> 
> 
>         No.  Please re-read the @throws IllegalArgumentException.
>         It is carefully worded to make no promises at all.  All bets are
>         off - period.
> 
>     OK great. But just to clarify, what exactly does "if the natural
>     order of the array elements is found to violate the Comparable
>     contract" mean?
> 
> 
> "natural order" is defined in the Comparable javadoc.
Sorry, I still don't see how this @throws can be a no-op. Is it not 
possible to craft an array of Comparables that violates the Comparable 
contract and therefore provoke the sort method to throw IAE?

-Chris.
>  
> http://download.java.net/jdk7/docs/api/java/lang/Comparable.html
> 
> We could use @linkplain to the Comparable spec, as elsewhere in java.util.
> 
> Martin