JDK 11 RFR of JDK-8196995: java.lang.Character should not state UTF-16 encoding is used for strings

[joe darcy]

Hello,

On 2/8/2018 3:53 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
> On 07/02/2018 22:12, joe darcy wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Text in java.lang.Character states a UTF-16 character encoding is 
>> used for java.lang.String. While was true for many years, it is not 
>> necessarily true and not true in practice as of JDK 9 due to the 
>> improvements from JEP 254: Compact Strings.
>>
>> The statement about the encoding should be corrected.
>>
>> Please review the patch below which does this. (I've formatted the 
>> patch so that the change is text is made clear; I'll re-flow the 
>> paragraph before pushing.
> I'm not sure that this is worth changing. You could replace "classes" 
> with "API" and add a note to say that an implementation may use an 
> more optimization representation but I don't think it's really needed.
>

In response to this feedback and others, how about:

      [...] The Java
   * platform uses the UTF-16 representation in {@code char} arrays and
- * in the {@code String} and {@code StringBuffer} classes. In
+ * presents a UTF-16 model in the string-related API.

IMO anyway, I think saying "uses a UTF-16 representation for String" is 
at best misleading with the current implementation since 8 != 16 for the 
compressed representation is used for all Latin-1 strings.

Thanks,

-Joe