[Biojava-dev] Why is the Residue Number a String?

[tallpaulinjax at yahoo.com]

Hi,
 
I was wondering why BioJava treats the ResidueNumber as a String while the PDB format specifies it as an Integer throughout the 3.2 specification? Perhaps it was a string in previous specs? The pertinent code in PDBFileParser is:
String residueNumber = line.substring(22,27).trim();
which is then later retrieved by a user as getPDBCode and setPDBCode within a Group, both as strings. BTW, it would seem a more obvious name would be residueName with getters and settors getResidueNumber and setResidueNumber... I always confuse the getPDBCode with returning the 4-character PDB code string!! :-).
 
Thanks!
 
Paul