[Fwd: Code review request: 7072353 JNDI libraries do not build with javac -Xlint:all -Werror]

[Alexandre Boulgakov]

On 8/3/2011 10:44 PM, Joe Darcy wrote:
> David Holmes wrote:
>> Joe Darcy said the following on 08/04/11 12:33:
>>> David Holmes wrote:
>>>>> Using wildcards makes the subtyping work along the type argument 
>>>>> axis.
>>>>
>>>> So what is the right fix here? To declare the underlying Vector as 
>>>> a Vector<?> and cast it to something concrete when needed? It seems 
>>>> very wrong to me to be inserting raw type casts all through this code.
>>>
>>> It isn't entirely clear to be from a quick inspection of the code 
>>> what the actual type usage is.  A writable general Vector should be 
>>> a Vector<Object> and Vector just meant for reading should be a 
>>> Vector<?> (or the equivalent Vector<? extends Object>).
>>>
>>> If the type usage is "a sequence of X's and Y's" where X and Y don't 
>>> have some useful supertype, I would recommend using a somewhat 
>>> different set of data structures, like a list of type-safe 
>>> heterogeneous containers or a list of a new package-level XorY class.
>>
>> Buried in one of Sasha's emails it says:
>>
>> "The current code uses it to store Strings and Vector<String>s."
>>
>> Hence it is declared Vector<Object>.
>>
>> This is looking to me like code that should not have been generified.
>>
>
> Hmm.  If String or Vector<String> are the two kinds of stored values, 
> I would recommend Vector<Vector<String>> where a lone string was 
> wrapped in a vector.  (Actually, I would recommend a 
> List<List<String>>, but that may be beyond the scope of this cleanup.

I can do Vector<Vector<String>>.

List<List<String>> is probably beyond the scope of removing compiler 
warnings; getting rid of Vectors and Hashtables in general could take a 
whole summer by itself, and would probably be best to do as a whole, 
since it's not always clear at first glance if other classes depend on a 
particular object being a Vector.

-Sasha
>
> -Joe
>