Re: Integer 128 != Integer 128 ??

From:
Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:49:15 -0400
Message-ID:
<i93372$17n$1@news.eternal-september.org>
On 10/12/2010 11:22 AM, Mike Schilling wrote:

"Eric Sosman" <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> wrote in message
[... concerning the evils of auto-boxing ...]

But a few years ago, somebody thought it would be a convenience
if Java did this and a few related things automatically.


As well as doing other C#-like things, some of which are great (the
enhanced for-loop) and some not (auto-boxing).


     Don't misunderstand me: I am not grumpily opposed to everything
that's been added to Java. The auto-boxing misfeature is the target
of my scorn, not the other stuff.

     Hey, here's another example that floated through this newsgroup
not so long ago: Somebody had a multi-threaded thingummy, and he
wanted to maintain a thread-safe counter of something. So he wrote
(paraphrased from inexact memory):

    class Whatever {
        // ...
        private static Integer count = 0;
        static void incrementCount() {
            synchronized(count) {
                count++;
            }
        }
        // ...
    }

.... and then he found that it wasn't working properly. It's my
belief that auto-boxing was entirely responsible for this error:
without auto-boxing, the compiler would have prevented him from
making it in the first place. To put it another way, auto-boxing
silenced a compile-time error and replaced it with a hard-to-debug
run-time error; in my book that's not an improvement.

     "Auto-boxing" means "I'm punching myself."

--
Eric Sosman
esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid

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