RFR: 5015163 "(str) String merge/join that is the inverse of String.split()" into JDK 8

[Stuart Marks]

On 5/1/12 10:16 AM, Rémi Forax wrote:
> On 05/01/2012 05:50 PM, Jim Gish wrote:
>> Should I proceed with improvements to String.join() or wait, for example,
>> until the lambda array support is there?
>
> better to ask Brian Goetz :)

Hi guys, this came back around to me internally to Oracle since I've been 
kicking around some similar ideas in the context of lambda, though nothing has 
made it to the lambda repos yet.

Unfortunately, while I don't think there is a direct dependency of String.join 
on any of the lambda stuff, we will probably want to coordinate the creation of 
these APIs. We don't want to put stuff into the mainline now, and then pull it 
out or retrofit it when the lambda stuff gets integrated later. So, strange as 
it may seem, it may be better to work on this in the lambda forest.

It's not clear to me that we have to move the discussion over to lambda-dev 
though. This is at least as much about libraries as it is about lambda.

(For those watching at home, the background regarding how this relates to 
lambda is described in [1] with some discussion starting at [2]. In a nutshell, 
the "lambdafied" libraries approach we're taking is to use lambda expressions 
to operate on streams of values. Right now streams look like Iterables but this 
is going to change. We want to be able to join streams of stringy things as 
well as arrays and collections.)

It's fun to think about how joining would work in a lambda/streamy kind of 
world, e.g.

     stream.infix(",").join(new StringBuilder()).toString()

or some such. There are a bunch of issues to consider here though, such as 
special-casing of types in the input stream, e.g., append CharSequence directly 
instead of calling toString(), treat int value as a Unicode code point, etc. 
There are also issues about the result type: StringBuilder? String? Appendable?

As much as I like the lambda stuff, though, I don't think having stream-based 
joining will supplant the need to have a good old-fashioned

     String.join(",", ...bunch of strings...)

s'marks

[1] http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/lambda/collections-overview.html

[2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/lambda-dev/2012-April/004758.html