I've recently been wondering about the following: With the resolution of NUMBERS-119 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUMBERS-119), all constructors in Fraction and BigFraction reduce the created fraction to lowest terms (in the constructor Fraction(double, double, int, int), this is not obvious, but because the convergents of a simple continued fraction are automatically reduced to lowest terms when calculated with the recursive formula used in the constructor, the fraction returned thereof is also reduced to lowest terms).
This rises the following question: Would it not be better if this reduction to lowest terms were made part of the contract of the two fields storing the numerator and denominator (i.e. included in their documentation), and, as a consequence, of the corresponding public accessor methods? Then the fact that the fraction is reduced to lowest terms when created from a constructor or a public factory method would become an implementation detail irrelevant to the caller of the method/constructor, which could also prevent confusion, seeing as the numerator-denominator factory methods are the only ones that explicitly state that the fraction is reduced to lowest terms, even though this is true for all other factory methods as well. Also, fractions returned from arithmetic operations are thereby also implicitly specified as being reduced to lowest terms, rendering mentions of this fact in these methods' documentation obsolete. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
