Generators (original) (raw)

Brian Goetz brian.goetz at oracle.com
Thu Jan 3 11:49:00 PST 2013

I'm looking over our generators. Currently we have:

repeat(T) repeat(n, T) repeatedly(Supplier) repeatedly(n, Supplier) iterate(T, UnaryOperator) cycle(Iterable)

I'd like to pare this down a lot. Paul and I have been discussing techniques for making limit() more efficient, at which point the first four can collapse to

generate(Supplier)

since you can simulate repeat(T) with generate(() -> T) and the limited versions with generate().limit().

That leaves us with

iterate(T, UnaryOperator) cycle(Iterable)

and I'm thinking cycle doesn't pull its weight either. If we took that out, we'd be down to the pleasantly small set of:

generate(Supplier) iterate(T, UnaryOperator)

For integer generators, we have

range(from, to)

and I think we should add

ints() -> sugar for range(0, MAX_INT)

(Or should ints() be truly infinite, wrapping around?)

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