On Mar 18, 2014, at 2:35 PM, John Rose <john.r.r...@oracle.com> wrote:
> On Mar 18, 2014, at 1:36 PM, Christian Thalinger
> <christian.thalin...@oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> Why are we not using an Enum instead of an "untyped" byte?
>
> Byte is moderately typed, in the sense (which I rely on during development)
> that you can't assign an int or char to a byte w/o a cast.
> That's why it is not just a plain int.
>
> But those values (L_TYPE etc.) are used a lot as numbers, and specifically as
> low-level array indexes, and also comparisons (x < V_TYPE).
>
> To turn them into enums, we'd have to add lots of calls to '.ordinal()' to
> turn them right back to numbers. That dilutes (completely IMO) the value
> they have as enums to raise the level of the code.
But without being strongly typed we get bugs like this one:
@Override
- MethodHandle bindArgument(int pos, char basicType, Object value) {
+ MethodHandle bindArgument(int pos, byte basicType, Object value) {
// If the member needs dispatching, do so.
if (pos == 0 && basicType == 'L') {
I’m just saying that for the sake of maintainability and correctness an Enum
would be better.
>
> — John
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