Re: Lists of size Integer.MAX_VALUE

From:
 Daniel Pitts <googlegroupie@coloraura.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:25:51 -0700
Message-ID:
<1183850751.013205.210010@g37g2000prf.googlegroups.com>
On Jul 7, 11:08 am, Lew <l...@lewscanon.nospam> wrote:

What would happen from a call like

someList.addAll( Integer.MAX_VALUE, someCollection );

where someList contains at least Integer.MAX_VALUE elements and someCollection
is not empty?

According to
<http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/List.html#add(int,%20E)>
void add(int index, E element)

Inserts the specified element at the specified position in this list (optional operation).

and throws

IndexOutOfBoundsException - if the index is out of range (index < 0 || index > size())


Suppose we have a List 'someList' containing exactly Integer.MAX_VALUE
elements and we
   someList.add( element );
or
   someList.add( Integer.MAX_VALUE, element );

According to the Javadocs, this is legal, but how then could we reference the
last element of the list?

(Presumably we're facing an OOME before these are testable problems in today's
JVMs.)

--
Lew


On a 64 bit machine with > 2gigs of memory, you can test this to see
what happens. I suspect that the original implementors thought "2
billion item arrays are enough for anyone" :-)

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