While discussing with colleagues, someone said: However, my main gripe is about not supporting in String representation of > an integer what is supported in its literal representation. > Thus, Integer x = 1_000_000; is valid, whereas > Integer.valueOf("1_000_000") is not. That sucks.
It seems to me that this is a reasonable expectation and has practical benefits (e.g. accepting program arguments that are integers with _'s). Supporting underscores in number literals (beginning JDK 7) was meant for readability of the Java source code. Perhaps doing this correctly incurs unwarranted implementation complexity in the JDK. As library writers however, how would you explain this mismatch? Was this side effect (arguably so) considered at all? Regards, Kedar