[kaffe] Bug Report: StackOverflowError and Collections

[Stephen Crawley]

Jim Pick <jim at kaffe.org> wrote:
> Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat.com> wrote:
> > It isn't clear to me that this is definitively a Classpath bug.  Who's
> > to say there isn't currently-working code out there that does the
> > opposite?  The JDK docs certainly don't specify this sort of thing.

> I think it depends on how you define "what is a bug".
> 
> Sure, it's not in the spec, but Sun implemented it a certain way, and
> that gets exposed, and code (eg. Ant, and probably others) depends on
> the way it was implemented.

I agree with Jim.  From what I recall, Sun conformance testing takes the
approach that the "gold standard" for Java is not the JavaDoc but the
behaviour of their JDK reference implementations.  Assuming that we want 
to "conformant", we should follow Sun's definition of what this means.

Besides, it is unrealistic to expecting people to code applications to
assume >>only<< what the JavaDocs says.  Most people don't write code
with the JavaDoc.  If they tried to, they'd probably fail because:

  1)  the javadoc is often incomplete, occasionally misleading and
      sometimes plain wrong, and

  2)  your average joe programmer has difficulty reading/comprehending
      precise specifications.

So, this sounds like a real bug.  The way to be sure would be to distill
it onto a Mauve testcase so that it can be run against various Sun JDKs.

-- Steve