On Feb 5, 2013, at 1:05 AM, Joseph Darcy <joe.da...@oracle.com> wrote: > > On 2/4/2013 1:36 PM, Stephen Colebourne wrote: >> On 4 February 2013 19:31, Joe Darcy <joe.da...@oracle.com> wrote: >>> The stripTrailingZeros method has acted in this surprising way since the >>> IBM-led JSR 13 was integrated into the platform back in JDK 5, which shipped >>> in 2004. >>> >>> This situation is analogous to when the specification and behavior disagree. >>> Our general policy to resolve such cases when evolving the JDK is: >>> >>> "..., there are times in evolving the JDK when differences are found between >>> the specified behavior and the actual behavior (for example 4707389, >>> 6365176). The two basic approaches to fixing these bugs are to change the >>> implementation to match the specified behavior or to change the >>> specification (in a platform release) to match the implementation's (perhaps >>> long-standing) behavior; often the latter option is chosen since it has a >>> lower de facto impact on behavioral compatibility." >>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~darcy/OpenJdkDevGuide/OpenJdkDevelopersGuide.v0.777.html >>> >>> If this issue were being addressed before JDK 5 shipped or even during JDK >>> 6, I would support changing the behavior of stripTrailingZeros. However, >>> for addressing this in JDK 8, I think it is more appropriate to keep the >>> behavior as-is and document this special case. >> I don't see what JDK 5 vs 6 vs 8 really has to do with it. > > The longer a particular behavior has been in a shipped JDK release, the more > likely it is various people have built code that depend on that behavior. >
This is one of those unfortunate cases where a bug can become a feature. Sometimes it is useful when evaluating to obtain empirical data on how much such a feature is used e.g. analysing jars from public maven repos: http://grepcode.com/search/usages?type=method&id=repository.grepcode.com%24java%24root@jdk%24openjdk@7-b147@java%24math@BigDecimal@stripTrailingZeros%28%29&k=u Of course i have no idea of the internals of BigDecimal and what knock on effects such a change would have. Paul.
