Javac currently uses packed integers to store source file positions, which hold the line and column position. These packed integers suffer from two problems:

1. very long source files, or files with very wide columns, can overrun the fields in the packed integer.

2. tools that need to create source from the parse trees, such as when refactoring, cannot reliably recreate source offsets due to column tab-expansion problems.

The agreed upon solution is to use source file character offsets instead of packed integers.
###@###.### 10/22/04 23:48 GMT