On 3 December 2011 01:30, Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]> wrote: > We will have to track when this error was introduced may be this is the > runtimeError fix that we pushed. > We should check on images to spot this regression. > > Now printing the contents of a stream by default looks to me a bad idea. > May be when the stream is positionable it makes sense but why would I force > to read the complete contents of a stream > when I open an inspector on it. > >
I think that 'contents' concept in streams are controversial. Just consider: - a stream which generates random numbers. every time you send #next, you get another random number. what is a contents of such stream? all random numbers it can generate till universe die? - a real-time stream broadcasting video/audio. what is a contents of such stream? you cannot capture whole contents of it, because these kinds of streams has no 'end'. It is because streams are for processing data in portions, and when you requesting contents of it, you turning it into collection. Here the Collection class comment: " I am the abstract superclass of all classes that represent a group of elements. " And Stream: " I am an abstract class that represents an accessor for a sequence of objects. This sequence is referred to as my "contents". " Yes. Of course, abstractly speaking, all streams containing something , but you can access it only by portions. Otherwise they will be no different to collections and therefore we won't need them. -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
