Presumably, a design flaw; in any case, one of the reasons many scientists do not program their computations in Java.

Read: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf and related papers from the same site.

''As a bonus, the linked paper serves as a great example of how ''not'' to argue a case, namely by pouring endless, hyperbolic invective on the subject of your critique in a bizarrely formated screed that looks like a print-out of a Wiki page.''

The same kind of design decisions are also present in C/C++ compilers (the Microsoft ones) and probably many other languages.

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CategoryJava