On Feb 28, 2014, at 5:54 PM, Stuart Marks wrote: > Woops, I forgot a couple points. > > The @serial for the 'signum' field at line 130 should be removed. Note that > even though this has the same name as the field that appears in the > serialized form, the text from the @serialField tag for 'signum' that's part > of the serialPersistentFields doc comment is the one that actually appears on > the "Serialized Form" page. > > It might be worthwhile copying the more verbose description from lines > 125-128 to the @serialField tag text (lines 4206-4207) since this describes > the requirements on the serialized form more precisely. I hate redundancy in > documentation, though. > > Note that the field names in the ObjectStreamField entries of the > serialPersistentFields array don't necessarily match the actual fields in the > class. In this case 'signum' matches but the others do not. That's ok. The > entries in this array describe the field names that are used in the > serialized output, which is essential for remaining compatible with older > versions of BigInteger.
That was my understanding so it's good to have it corroborated. > I checked an old version of BigInteger from 1998 and the field names used > here match the actual, serialized fields from that old version. This sort of detail is really good to hear. I'll incorporate the lot when I update. Thanks much! Brian
