| > Are there Java design documents that describe the language in these terms, as opposed to something like "a general-purpose object oriented language"? I'm sure there aren't. And truthfully, I understand that Java was supposed to be efficient enough to run on small devices and whatnot. But if you look at the evolution of the language as well as where it's mostly used in recent history (no more web browser applets, for example), it seems to me that it has a bit of an identity crisis. Is it the low level implementation language of the JVM platform, or is it a high level app development language? > True, if you increment a number, you will typically expect the result to be greater. I'd say this is a pretty big deal for people who are reasoning about code. > But how many application domains are there where 2^32 - 1 is really the exact upper limit of the range of valid values? I would think that in most cases catching a overflow would come much too late, because the actual error is exceeding some application-specific limit rather than the artificial limit of the range of int. Agreed. But I've almost never seen code that actually checks value ranges before and after math operations. And Java doesn't make it easy or efficient to do a "newtype" pattern so that the types actually are limited in any meaningful way. Instead, most enterprisey backend systems I've worked on just accept a JSON request, deserialize some `quantity` fields to an `int`, and go to town with it. > Or put differently, I bet 99.9% of ArrayIndexOutOfBounds errors are because indices leave their legal range without ever overflowing int. I'm sure that's true. But indexing a collection is not the issue I was thinking about. |