RFR 8071597 Add Stream dropWhile and takeWhile operations

[Stuart Marks]

On 6/3/15 9:21 AM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
> I had prepared an alternative rendition stashed away just in case this came up :-)
>
> I still want to retain a punchy short first paragraph. What do you think about the following?
>
>       /**
> -     * Returns a stream consisting of the longest prefix of elements taken from
> -     * this stream that match the given predicate.
> +     * Returns a stream consisting of elements taken from this stream that match
> +     * the given predicate.

Well, I'm sorry to say, this reminds me of that old tech support joke about the 
answer that is technically true but completely useless. :-)

It's not incorrect, of course, but it's almost indistinguishable from the first 
sentence of Stream.filter().

People who know what "takeWhile" means will raise an eyebrow at this, go read 
the rest of the doc, and go "ohhh, yeah there's this complication with unordered 
streams." People who are trying to learn the system will go "Huh?"

I agree on the need for a punchy first sentence since that's what goes into the 
Method Summary. The difficulty is making something sufficiently general that it 
covers all the cases, while not making it so vague as to be useless.

Sorry, but I don't have any better suggestions at the moment. I might be able to 
come up with something in the next few days... but don't let this hold you up if 
you need to press forward.

s'marks