[loc-en-dev] Java Identifiers unstable?

[Mark Davis ☕]

I know this isn't the right forum, but I'm not sure how to report it.

Unicode has mechanisms to guarantee that program identifiers are stable over
versions of Unicode, and defines properties that have that guarantee:
XID_Start and XID_Continue (see http://unicode.org/reports/tr31/).

Sun was actually the one that brought up this issue, back some 6 or 7 years,
prompting the Consortium to develop a definition that guaranteed stability.

However, when I look at the documentation for isJavaIdentifierPart,
isCharacteIdentifierPart,
etc., it appears that these are defined not in terms of those properties,
but in terms of properties that are *not* stable over releases.

http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Character.html#isJavaIdentifierPart(int)
etc.

That means that a program that was compiled under one release of Java could
fail under a future one, simply because the identifiers break under the new
release.

It may be a matter of just documentation being wrong, or it could be the
underlying implementation. Anyway, how can I surface this?

Mark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/locale-enhancement-dev/attachments/20101007/176877b6/attachment.html