Talk:Forward compatibility
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] Upward is Backward, Downward is Forward
After conducting some research into the matter, it appears that Upward Compatibility actually means Backward Compatibility. Refer to the following Sun documents for examples of this usage.
http://java.sun.com/javase/compatibility_j2se1.4.1.html
Here is an excerpt.
"The Java 2 SDK, v1.4.1 is upwards binary-compatible with Java 2 SDK, v1.4.0 except for the incompatibilities listed below. This means that, except for the noted incompatibilities, class files built with version 1.4.0 compilers will run correctly in the Java 2 SDK, v1.4.1."
Sun's documents always refer to the earlier versions as the "upward" versions; hence, in the sense of compatibility, "upward" is "backward".
Suggest changing the redirects appropriately.
[edit] Google says otherwise.... upward = forward and downward = backward
Plug _"backward compatible" "downward compatible"_ into Google and you will see what I mean.
Also, I didn't check the other languages, but the Japanese entry for backward is "kai" which corresponds to downward. Likewise, the Japanese entry for forward is "joi" which corresponds to upward.
Either way, this needs to be clarified and unified across languages.
Kylethewright (talk) 18:39, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
- Why does it need to be unified? If Japanese happens to use the word for "downward" in that language, there's no requirement for English to do the same, or vice versa. Marnanel (talk) 16:35, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] general updates to article
I am removing the part about ms office as it is not really correct. The docx format is a compressed version of a variant of xml describing the document, whilst the old doc format was a proprietary binary format uncompressed. Also the docx patch for 2003 isn't forward compatibility because it was made after the release of office 2007. The code example section is also a bit too technical so I tagged that as well. Da rulz07 (talk) 13:13, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
