Why doesn't java.lang.Number implement Comparable?
- by Julien Chastang
Does anyone know why java.lang.Number does not implement Comparable? This means that you cannot sort Numbers with Collections.sort which seems to me a little strange.
Post discussion update:
Thanks for all the helpful responses. I ended up doing some more research about this topic.
The simplest explanation for why java.lang.Number does not implement Comparable is rooted in mutability concerns.
For a bit of review, java.lang.Number is the abstract super-type of AtomicInteger, AtomicLong, BigDecimal, BigInteger, Byte, Double, Float, Integer, Long and Short. On that list, AtomicInteger and AtomicLong to do not implement Comparable.
Digging around, I discovered that it is not a good practice to implement Comparable on mutable types because the objects can change during or after comparison rendering the result of the comparison useless. Both AtomicLong and AtomicInteger are mutable. The API designers had the forethought to not have Number implement Comparable because it would have constrained implementation of future subtypes. Indeed, AtomicLong and AtomicInteger were added in Java 1.5 long after java.lang.Number was initially implemented.
Apart from mutability, there are probably other considerations here too. A compareTo implementation in Number would have to promote all numeric values to BigDecimal because it is capable of accommodating all the Number sub-types. The implication of that promotion in terms of mathematics and performance is a bit unclear to me, but my intuition finds that solution kludgy.
