avoiding bootclasspath

Greetings,

I noticed the scalac, scala scripts place scala.jar on the
bootclasspath (i.e. -Xbootclasspath...). Unfortunately for me, altering
the bootclasspath makes Scala a no-go for deployment environments I'm
interested in (e.g. Webstart). As a clueless hack, I simply moved it to
the classpath and was delighted to see that the couple examples I tried
(a parser, swing app) still worked correctly.

So my question: is this approach merely for convenience (perhaps so
that a user can change normal classpath settings at will) or does the
Scala runtime rely on it and my results are a fluke? And in either
case, will Scala2 share the same behavior?

Thank you much for your time.

Jason