Comments on: Taking the Steve Yegge Challenge (Part 1: Bits and Bytes)

By: Pagoman

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By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:18:38 +0000

Great questions!
1) I almost added info about this above, and in fact I’ve just gone back and added another bullet. The short answer is that Math.abs fails for the smallest negative 2’s complement number. For example, -2147483648 as an int arg.

2) One reason double and long are special in Java is that, since they are each 64 bit, it is not guaranteed by the JMM that either will be updated atomically – it’s possible for one thread to see a partially modified (only one of the two 32-bit words) long or double which was set by another thread.

4) No, Java throws no overflow exception.

I will leave #3 as an exercise to the reader

By: Alex Miller

Alex Miller — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:01:55 +0000

And of course some followup interview questions:

1) When does Math.abs() return a negative value? The necessary information is contained above.

2) Why are double and long special?

3) What special values exist in the floating point types? What are their bit values?

4) On underflow or overflow, does Java throw an exception?