Hi,
I've been looking into an old doc issue [1] on incompleteness in description of
handling incorrect arguments in BufferedWriter.write(String, int, int).
In a nutshell it's concerned that given the following facts:
1. Writer.write(String str, int off, int len)
promises to throw IndexOutOfBoundsException
if (off < 0) or (len < 0) or (off+len < 0) or (off+len > str.length())
2. class BufferedWriter extends Writer
3. BufferedWriter.write(String s, int off, int len)
states [2] that in contrast to its parent it won't do anything
if (len < 0)
behaviour of BufferedWriter.write(String s, int off, int len) is unspecified for
other cases mentioned in its parent.
I thought it's very natural to think that you don't need to copy-paste contracts
into children unless they break it or you want to elaborate some details.
Basically because of subtype relationship, general principles of OOP and Liskov
Substitution Principle.
i.e. in this case a line in BufferedWriter.write's javadoc
* @exception IndexOutOfBoundsException {@inheritDoc}
is implied.
Unfortunately, BufferedWriter.write disobeys [3] the remainder of the contract
of its parent. So we either have to make additional notes in the javadoc like
with `len < 0` case or go and fix the bug instead.
I wonder if it makes sense to fix those bugs altogether and remove the initial
`len < 0` exceptional behavior. I fully understand that it formally breaks
backwards compatibility because of the cases where such calls were lurking in
code and ran unnoticed. But [2] shows that it wasn't done for some specific use
case but rather was a mistake. Thus I don't think it would be a big stretch to
assume that this thing affects no real world applications. Otherwise people
would have noticed that something is not being written at all.
P.S. I'm very interested in an outcome of this case mainly because I've noticed
some more similar things in java.io package (e.g. [4]).
Thanks.
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[1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8029804
[2] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-4156573
[3] To be honest, it silently disobeys parent's guarantees, thus some
bizarre things are possible:
bw.write("abc", 1, Integer.MAX_VALUE); // ok
bw.write("abc", -1, -1); // ok
bw.write("abc", -1, 1); // undeclared StringIndexOutOfBoundsException
[4] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8067801
