On Thursday, November 29, 2012, apwashere wrote:
*grin*. Do you have any thoughts about whether this is something worth addressing at the present time, e.g. via an improvement or pull request? Or is this perhaps just not important enough now to merit changing a class with a potentially wide impact?
I may not have taken in the whole what-is-done-where matrix, but it was my impression the implementation generated as Int.unbox isn't ever called by generated code. It is a public method in the library so we do have to assume it's in use, but I doubt changing it would have a wide impact. That said, we would be far more likely to create trouble by changing it than we would by leaving it alone; both because "change" is more dangerous than "no change", and because the change in question takes a presently unexceptional case and makes it exceptional.
If we're not using it in generated code and don't intend to, the ideal change is probably to deprecate it and then remove it. Next best (and to do regardless) is to document the behavior and the fact that it isn't actually used by the compiler. There's no way which doesn't risk breakage to change the semantics of the method while leaving it in place.