Hi Vinnie, Roger Riggs wrote:
The 'forEachOrdered' should not be necessary and may raise questions about why. if there's no good reason, use 'forEach’.
Using forEachOrdered() is necessary. The dumpAsStream() method produces a stream; presumably it has a defined order that's the same as its input. The semantics of Stream.forEach() are extremely relaxed, and in particular it's not required to process stream elements in order, even if the stream is ordered. (In practice this is noticeable if the stream is run in parallel.)
I'd use forEachOrdered() both in the examples and also where you use it in implementations.
The methods that return streams should specify the important characteristics. Probably the ones most important one are that the returned stream is ordered and sequential. For the overloads that take fixed-size input, the resulting stream might also be SIZED.
I'm not convinced that the overloads that send output to an OutputStream pull their weight. They basically wrap the OutputStream in a PrintStream, which conveniently doesn't declare IOException, making it easy to use from a lambda passed to forEachOrdered(). If an error writing the output occurs, this is recorded by the PrintStream wrapper; however, the wrapper is then thrown away, making it impossible for the caller to check its error status.
The PrintStream wrapper also uses the platform default charset, and doesn't provide any way for the caller to override the charset.
Instead, you can just provide the Stream-returning methods, and let the user send the output to a PrintStream using forEachOrdered() as in your examples.
It might be nice to provide convenience APIs to send output elsewhere, but the problem is that it seems difficult to do so without losing control over things like error handling or charsets. In particular, since the hex formatter is producing strings, it seems like there should be an option to send the output to a Writer. Unfortunately it's difficult to do so from a Stream, because all the Writer methods throw IOException. However, solving this isn't hexdump's problem.
s'marks
