RFR 8009736: Comparator API cleanup

[Tom Hawtin]

On 14/06/2013 11:07, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>
> On Jun 13, 2013, at 7:28 PM, Tom Hawtin <tom.hawtin at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12/06/2013 17:36, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>>
>>> "The returned comparator is serializable and does not permit null arguments when comparing objects".
>>
>> Being Serializable at all is odd. It brings the previously
>> implementation-dependent name and fields into the API spec.
>>
>
> That is, alas, inherently the nature of serialization. Collections are serializable, some collections take Comparator instances on construction (e.g. TreeSet).

It follows that reasonably some Comparators should be Serializable, but 
it does not follow that all Comparators are necessarily Serializable. 
You can have, say, a TreeSet<MappedByteBuffer> but it isn't necessarily 
[runtime] serialisable.

As is Comparators$NullComparator will appear in the spec for all time. I 
want to check that we're happy with this.

> I dunno what to say except "serialization is bad! i wish it were never in the JDK" :-)

And the same for most of the rest of the Java Class Library*.

Tom

*There are parts of String which I think are okay.