Re: Java and OO Concepts

Pete Hall skrev:

Thorbjoern Ravn Andersen wrote:

Unless you have good reason to, do not use double/float/int/ but instead
their object equivalents.

Thorbjoern, why do you say that?

I was actually wondering myself when I wrote it but could not crystalize out a reason then.

It is basically my personal experience in what gives the least resistance in the long run, where I have reached that conclusion.

Primitive types are not objects so they cannot be subclassed if different behaviour is needed. They cannot be used as parameters to methods expecting an object (like slf4j which I use a lot), and ALWAYS require special treatment everywhere. They cannot have a descriptive toString method!

(Autoboxing helps but is not available in 1.4 which we still need to target for some customers).

If you need to do lots of scientific calculations, fine thats what they were designed for. If you need to haul data around and present it, objects will do fine. Also please note that doubles and floats are not good for exact numbers - if rounding errors (e.g. on stock inventory) are a matter of concern you need something else. For objects you can change the underlying representation without changing the source everywhere it is used.

Please note that this goes for fields in classes, not counters in code etc.