<i18n dev> Currency updates in JDK 7

[Naoto Sato]

Hi Stephen,

Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> Unfortunately, not all currencies are associated with countries. Some,
> like XAG for 'silver', XDR for 'IMF drawing rights' or XXX for 'no
> currency' have no matching country. Thus, this file format is unable
> to represent user overrides to those countries.

You meant "those currencies" here, right?  If that's the case, yes it is 
true.  We might need these currencies be updated in this properties file 
by enhancing the file format, however, the frequency for those 
currencies being updated is much less than the ones associated with 
particular countries.

> 
> Further, the Javadoc is unclear as to whether users can _add_ new
> currencies. An example would be if a country split, like Czech/Slovak,
> and created two currencies. Does the new format add a currency to the
> built in list if it isn't recognised?

Right now, there is no mechanism to update the ISO-3166 country codes in 
the JRE.  So even though the format itself is capable of accepting any 
(new or old) country codes, it does not work for new ISO-3166 country codes.

> I believe that we should also consider if Currency should implement
> Comparable, sorting alphabetically on the currency code. While there
> are many possible sort orders, having this as the default one makes a
> lot of sense.

Having the class Comparable makes sense to me.  Although the default may 
be arguable (ISO-3166 code has numeric values independent of the three 
letter codes).

> Finally, I'd like to see a method isPsuedoCurrency() added. This would
> return a boolean indicating if the currency is 'real' or not.

This one is also nice to have.

Naoto

> 
> Otherwise the changes pretty much complete the use cases for the class.
> 
> Stephen