comparators of integral writable types are not transitive for inequalities

Consider the following code from IntWritable.java :

public int compare(byte[] b1, int s1, int l1,
byte[] b2, int s2, int l2)

{ int thisValue = readInt(b1, s1); int thatValue = readInt(b2, s2); return thisValue - thatValue; }

If a Java Runtime subtracts 20 from -(2^31 - 10) it gets a huge positive number, not the negative value that the comparator should return.

LongWritable does this right, of course.

That last line should be

return (thisValue<thatValue ? -1 : (thisValue==thatValue ? 0 : 1));

-dk