Deprecate Double.MIN_VALUE?

[Archie Cobbs]

Having been bitten by this bug myself, I would vote yes on this one.

For symmetry's sake, I would think there should be four new constants - for
{MIN,MAX}_{POSITIVE,NEGATIVE}_VALUE - and that both of {MIN,MAX}_VALUE
should be deprecated.

-Archie

On Mon, Dec 2, 2024 at 5:18 PM Éamonn McManus <emcmanus at google.com> wrote:

> At Google, we've had several issues over the years relating to
> Double.MIN_VALUE. People have not unreasonably supposed that
> Double.MIN_VALUE has the same relationship to Double.MAX_VALUE as
> Integer.MIN_VALUE has to Integer.MAX_VALUE. So they think that
> Double.MIN_VALUE is the (finite) negative number of largest magnitude,
> rather than the positive number of smallest magnitude. We're currently
> thinking of adding a constant MIN_POSITIVE_VALUE to Guava's Doubles
> <https://guava.dev/releases/snapshot-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/primitives/Doubles.html> class
> and having static analysis that suggests using that instead of
> Double.MIN_VALUE, if that is indeed what you meant, or of course using
> -Double.MAX_VALUE if *that* is what you meant.
>
> A few JDK and JavaFX bugs show that Google engineers are not the only ones
> to be confused by this:
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-4218647
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8092698
> https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8156186
>
> So we also wonder if it would make sense to deprecate Double.MIN_VALUE
> itself and introduce Double.MIN_POSITIVE_VALUE with the same meaning.
> Obviously the same thing would apply to Float.
>


-- 
Archie L. Cobbs
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