Method.equals()

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

I am going through the patches that the Orp developers submitted to
Classpath. The following patch to Method puzzles me:

2001-12-17  Wu Gansha <address@hidden>
 
        * vm/reference/java/lang/reflect/Method.java: Reimplemented
equals(), refined toString().

Index: vm/reference/java/lang/reflect/Method.java
===================================================================
RCS file:
/home/gwu2/cvs/classpath/classpath/vm/reference/java/lang/reflect/Method.java,v
retrieving revision 1.4
diff -w -r1.4 Method.java
145c145,161
<     return this == o;
---
>     if (o == null)
>         return false;
>     if (!(o instanceof Method))
>               return false;
>       Method m = (Method)o;
>       if(!name.equals(m.getName()))
>           return false;
>       if(!declaringClass.equals(m.getDeclaringClass()))
>           return false;
>       Class[] params1 = getParameterTypes();
>       Class[] params2 = m.getParameterTypes();
>       if(params1.length != params2.length)
>           return false;
>       for(int i = 0; i < params1.length; i++)
>           if(params1[i] != params2[i])
>               return false;
>       return true;

Why/When is this neccessary? The comment to equals says:

 Two Methods are semantically equivalent if they have the same declaring
 class, name, and parameter list.  This ignores different exception
 clauses, but since you can't create a Method except through the VM,
 this is just the == relation.

So this comment is wrong for Orp, but when does this happen?

Maybe we should just mark this method "native" in Classpath and
leave it to the VM implementor.

Cheers,

Mark