ARM Blocks: ease of use and for loops

[Kevin Bourrillion]

Thread-resurrect...

I think detecting 'iterator instanceof Closeable' is an outstanding
idea, and one that would solve problems that have been vexing me as a
library developer for years.

The foreach construct owns the creation of that instance, and is the
only party that has a reference to it.  If the instance is Closeable,
it feels simply irresponsible to ignore this.

As for the potential risks, we're talking about an instance that's
unreachable and eligible for GC, so it's difficult to imagine that
closing such an instance could be a bad idea.  Looked another way, if
a user didn't want automatic close for some reason, that reason would
already be preventing that user from using foreach anyway.

+10



On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Howard Lovatt <howard.lovatt at iee.org>wrote:
>
>> I think you can choose if close to applies to the Iterable or the Iterator.
>
>
> Agreed. But if it applies to the Iterable, the programmer can easily use an
> ARM block around the for-each loop.  If it applies to the Iterator, there is
> no way for the programmer to do it.  That's why support is needed in that
> case.
>
>



-- 
Kevin Bourrillion @ Google
internal:  http://go/javalibraries
external: guava-libraries.googlecode.com