[loc-en-dev] Java Identifiers unstable?

[Naoto Sato]

Hi Mark,

It looks like the javadoc has been the same since JDK 1.1 days ("char" 
version of the APIs), and AFAIK, the implementation does not follow the 
TR31.

Do you remember who at Sun brought this issue to the consortium? I would 
like to know to what extent s/he went about this, but probably we end up 
filing a bug to correct the APIs and their implementations.

Naoto

(10/7/10 8:07 AM), Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
> 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