/*
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
* contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
* this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
* The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
* (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
* the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
package java.lang;
/**
* This interface should be implemented by all classes which wish to define a
* <em>natural ordering</em> of their instances. The ordering rule must be
* transitive and invertable (i.e. the sign of the result of x.compareTo(y) must
* equal the negation of the sign of the result of y.compareTo(x) for all x and
* y).
* <p>
* In addition, it is desireable (but not required) that when the result of
* x.compareTo(y) is zero (and only then) the result of x.equals(y) should be
* true.
*
*/
public interface Comparable<T>
{
/**
* Answers an integer indicating the relative positions of the receiver and
* the argument in the natural order of elements of the receiver's class.
*
*
* @return int which should be <0 if the receiver should sort before the
* argument, 0 if the receiver should sort in the same position as
* the argument, and >0 if the receiver should sort after the
* argument.
* @param another
* Object an object to compare the receiver to
* @throws ClassCastException
* if the argument can not be converted into something
* comparable with the receiver.
*/
int compareTo(T another);
}