Java compatibility? (was Re: Not a bash, just the facts)

[Dalibor Topic]

Alan McKinnon <alan <at> linuxholdings.co.za> writes:

> But of all these engineering mistakes, has Sun ever removed any of 
> them after they were deprecated?

They have not removed symbols from the set specified as J2SE API, afaik.

That's why KEY_SEPARATER in AWT, and various instances of public RCSID 
fields in Swing still exist in the API specs. KEY_SEPARATER was there since AWT
1.0 or 1.1, a field with a more conventional spelling of the name was introduced
in the followup release, afair.

I'd consider radically changing the behaviour of a specified method to be worse,
than actually removing it: if it's gone, programs using it will break loudly. If
it is changed to do something else, then those programs may fail silently, which
is much worse.

cheers,
dalibor topic