202_jess bug?

[Patrick Doyle]

I'm sorry that this does not pertain to Classpath per se, but it seems to
be the kind of thing you guys would have thought about at some point...
What is Class.getConstructor supposed to do when the matching constructor 
is not public?

When I run the SPECjvm98 202_jess benchmark, with my slightly hacked
Classpath library, it dies with the message "*** FATAL ***: Missing
intrinsic function class".  When I looked into it, the benchmark calls
Class.getConstructor, which is supposed to return only a public
constructor.  The class it is trying to probe has only one constructor,
which javap prints like this:

  spec.benchmarks._202_jess.jess._return();

To me, the lack of access specifiers here means that this constructor is 
not public.  Thus, the correct behaviour for getConstructor is (I think) 
to throw a NoSuchMethodException, which it does.  The benchmark clearly 
does not expect an exception to be thrown, and produces the error message.

So what going on here?  Should I just be happily returning the constructor 
even if it's not public?  If so, what is the difference between 
getConstructor and getDeclaredConstructor?

Thanks for your help.

--
Patrick Doyle
address@hidden