Java PriorityQueue initialCapacity cannot be zero

It is mentioned in the docs, but who reads them, right?

Looking through the PriorityQueue implementation, I couldn't really tell why this restriction is necessary. They use an Object[] array to represent the heap and store items from index 1 vs index 0 to help the math. They also have a - int size - that keeps track of the number of elements in the PriorityQueue.

Seems like they could have made this work even for a PriorityQueue with an initialCapacity of 0. This could avoid some bugs from the call-site where a PriorityQueue is initialized with an initialCapacity obtained from another source (ex: the number of records that match a certain criteria in a table) and this could very well be zero.

Update:
Andrew Hayley who made this patch - http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java-patches/2006-q3/msg00426.html - did that only to pass the tests. As I hear from other devs involved in the JDK, I will add those details here.