RFR: 8170769 Provide a simple hexdump facility for binary data
Stuart Marks
stuart.marks at oracle.com
Thu Dec 6 02:18:39 UTC 2018
Hi Vinnie,
Roger Riggs wrote:
>> The 'forEachOrdered' should not be necessary and may raise questions about why.
>> if there's no good reason, use 'forEach’.
Using forEachOrdered() is necessary. The dumpAsStream() method produces a
stream; presumably it has a defined order that's the same as its input. The
semantics of Stream.forEach() are extremely relaxed, and in particular it's not
required to process stream elements in order, even if the stream is ordered. (In
practice this is noticeable if the stream is run in parallel.)
I'd use forEachOrdered() both in the examples and also where you use it in
implementations.
The methods that return streams should specify the important characteristics.
Probably the ones most important one are that the returned stream is ordered and
sequential. For the overloads that take fixed-size input, the resulting stream
might also be SIZED.
I'm not convinced that the overloads that send output to an OutputStream pull
their weight. They basically wrap the OutputStream in a PrintStream, which
conveniently doesn't declare IOException, making it easy to use from a lambda
passed to forEachOrdered(). If an error writing the output occurs, this is
recorded by the PrintStream wrapper; however, the wrapper is then thrown away,
making it impossible for the caller to check its error status.
The PrintStream wrapper also uses the platform default charset, and doesn't
provide any way for the caller to override the charset.
Instead, you can just provide the Stream-returning methods, and let the user
send the output to a PrintStream using forEachOrdered() as in your examples.
It might be nice to provide convenience APIs to send output elsewhere, but the
problem is that it seems difficult to do so without losing control over things
like error handling or charsets. In particular, since the hex formatter is
producing strings, it seems like there should be an option to send the output to
a Writer. Unfortunately it's difficult to do so from a Stream, because all the
Writer methods throw IOException. However, solving this isn't hexdump's problem.
s'marks
More information about the core-libs-dev
mailing list