RFR JDK-8012645: Stream methods on BitSet, Random, ThreadLocalRandom, ZipFile (original) (raw)

Steven Schlansker stevenschlansker at gmail.com
Tue Apr 30 17:01:11 UTC 2013

On Apr 30, 2013, at 9:35 AM, Paul Sandoz <paul.sandoz at oracle.com> wrote:

On Apr 30, 2013, at 5:43 PM, Henry Jen <henry.jen at oracle.com> wrote:

So if possible we should report ORDERED and state the association, if any, of encounter order with the order declared in the central directory, which i hope is, and seems to be, the same. (Plus update the docs of entries() too.)

I agree with you entries() and streams() should be in sync on ordering. Spec-wise, I have no clear preference. But when I looked into a zip file archive, I always would like to see entries in alphabetic order so I can find the files I really care, which will also have directory structure nicely. Order in central directory not necessary helping me. There does appear to be a well-defined encounter order. I don't think most developers will consider the collection of zip entries to behave like a Set. It is more list-like.

For what it's worth, as a random developer that has used Zip[Input,Output]Stream on occasion, I sometimes depend on the ordering property for application specific uses. The most common is if you are taking a "hot backup" or "hot restore" of some sort of data structure, you would wish to ensure that data is written in / out in "data dependency order" so that you don't write references to data that has not been restored yet.

I am not sure that this is a good justification for keeping the stream ORDERED, but maybe it is.

Best, Steven

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