why does my compare method throw exception — Comparison method violates its general contract!

Question

Why does this code

public class SponsoredComparator implements Comparator {

    public boolean equals(SRE arg0, SRE arg1){
        return arg0.g         


        

Answer 1

The contract between equals() and compareTo() is that when equals() returns true, compareTo() should return 0 and when equals() is false compareTo should return -1 or +1.

BTW: I assume your compare() method is not called very often as the debug messages will use up a signficiant amount of CPU and memory.