Wording improvements for String.indexOf, String.lastIndexOf

[Martin Buchholz]

Alan, thanks for the comments.

"returns true" works well for expressions
containing exactly one method call,
but e.g. in indexOf(String str, int fromIndex)
it is a complex expression, where Sherman's "is true"
would be more correct.  Because of this, I'm still
inclined not to change this.

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~martin/webrevs/openjdk7/IndexOf-javadoc/

Martin

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 03:23, Alan Moore <uncle.alice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 14:35, Xueming Shen <xueming.shen at oracle.com> wrote:
>>> Seems like the "is <code>true</code>." line is missing from the new wording
>>> (in
>>> all cases), is it purposely? Not a native, but I would assume we still need
>>> those 2 words to make the sentence complete.
>>
>> It is true that "is true"
>> would make it a grammatically complete sentence,
>> but I think it's best to not be quite that pedantic and lawyerly.
>> In general, the JDK makes a pretty good compromise between
>> precision and readability.
> I think Sherman has a good point, except the wording should be
> "returns true" instead of "is true" (with, of course, "true" formatted
> to indicate that it's a boolean literal, not an English word).  That
> would make it consistent with methods that return other-than-boolean
> values, as well as being considerate of non-native English speakers
> who see a method name like "startsWith" and _don't_ automatically read
> it as the English phrase "starts with".
>