[jdom-interest] Verifier finality

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

About half the methods in Verifier are final.  About half aren't. I was 
wondering if this makes sense.

1. I don't think this is an optimization. All the methods are static and 
can thus be inlined by the compiler already. We don't gain anything 
extra by making them final.

2. Do we want to allow people to subclass this class? If not, we should 
probabaly just go ahead and declare the whole class final. The class is 
implicitly final now, because the only constructor is private.If that's 
our intention, we should make it more explicit.

3. Even if a programmer could subclass this class, they still couldn't 
choose to use their own Verifier instead of ours.

4. I can think of one use-case for subclassing Verifier: implementing 
the looser XML 1.1 rules for names.

We need a firm story on subclassing for Verifier. Either it can't be 
subclassed, in which case we should decalre it final and remove the 
final modifier from the indivudal methods; or it can be subclassed, in 
which case we still remove the final modifier from the individual 
methods and expose the constructor as at least protected.

Thoughts?

-- 
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo at metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|           The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (IDG Books, 2001)             |
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|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
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