Name: vi73552 Date: 07/16/99


When debugging a co-worker's class, I noticed an incorrect
constructor invocation that was being silently passed by
the compiler. As it turned out, the compiler was getting
confused by the incorrect statement, causing it to miscompile
the class.

The following test case demonstrates the problem:

public class test {
    int x = 1;
    int y = 2;
    
    public test() {
        this.super(); // should be caught as an error
    }
    
    public static void main(String[] arg) {
        test t = new test();
        System.out.println(t.x + t.y);
    }
}

The constructor clearly contains a bogus explicit
constructor invocation, but the compiler doesn't
complain. It turns out that the initialization for
t.x and t.y are not compiled into the resulting
class file, causing the main method to print out 0
rather than 3.
(Review ID: 85689)
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