PrintWriter again

Sat Aug 5 18:13:00 GMT 2000

Oskar> According to the Sun JDK 1.3 api docs, println(whatever) in
Oskar> PrintWriter should call print(whatever) and then println(). At
Oskar> least that's how I interpret the documentation:
Oskar> "This method behaves as though it invokes print(boolean) and
Oskar> then println()."
That "as if" is important.
Oskar> The reason for this is that it makes it easy for a subclass of
Oskar> PrintWriter to catch all newline-writes by overriding a single
Oskar> method. In my IndentWriter I buffer all non-newline terminated
Oskar> text, and when println is called I format and finally print the
Oskar> buffered text.
What do you do if print(String) is called and the string has an
embedded newline?
Oskar> The libgcj implementation of println(whatever) calls first
Oskar> print(whatever) then the private method printlnUnsynchronized.
Oskar> I would rather see it behave like the Sun implementation.
I agree that this would be more useful, but my reading of the docs is
that this is not a portable assumption.
However, I don't have a very strong feeling about this. Obviously
this change is going to have a performance cost, but it can't be very
large. So I'm inclined to make this change. Anybody oppose this?
Tom