Constants for standard charsets -- CR #4884238

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2011/4/12 10:38 -0700, mike.duigou at oracle.com:
> On Apr 12 2011, at 03:33 , Alan Bateman wrote:
>> ...
>> 
>> 2. @see Charsets.DEFAULT, I assume this should be @see Charsets#DEFAULT_CHARSET
> 
> Correct. I changed it to DEFAULT_CHARSET and forgot to fix this link.

Why is forcing people to type Charsets.DEFAULT_CHARSET better than
Charsets.DEFAULT?

If DEFAULT_CHARSET needs the _CHARSET suffix then don't the other
constants need that too?  Why is DEFAULT special?

>> ...
>> 
>> I was thinking more about DEFAULT_CHARSET and I'm not sure that we
>> really need it. In the java.io package then all constructors that take
>> a Charset also have a constructor that uses the default charset, same
>> thing in java.lang.String and java.util.zip package. In
>> javax.tools.JavaCompiler I see that null can be used to select the
>> default charset. In java.nio.file.Files then we didn't include
>> versions of readAllLines, newBufferedReader, etc. that didn't take a
>> Charset parameter.

I tend to agree with Alan that the DEFAULT isn't really necessary.
There's already a perfectly good method for that, and invoking a method
rather than referencing a static field makes it harder for developers to
assume, incorrectly, that it's actually constant across platforms.

- Mark