ReversibleCollection proposal

[Stephen Colebourne]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2021 at 18:41, Stuart Marks <stuart.marks at oracle.com> wrote:
> This is a proposal to add a ReversibleCollection interface to the Collections
> Framework. I'm looking for comments on overall design before I work on detailed
> specifications and tests. Please send such comments as replies on this email thread.

I think this could be an interesting addition to the framework.

> # Ordering and Reversibility

Reading this section, it seems like ordering is a more significant
quality than reversibility. Yet the API is named "reversible". That
seems odd, esepcially given the stream characteristic.

> SortedSet::addFirst and addLast throw UnsupportedOperationException. This is because
> SortedSet's ordering is determined by the comparison method and cannot be controlled
> explicitly.

This seems undesirable. Maybe SortedSet should not implement
reversible/ordered? Maybe they should add to the set but validate
whether they would be in first/last position? Simply allowing users to
get a new instance with a different (eg. reversed) comparator would
meet much of the use case.

Also, SortedSet uses first() and last(), yet the proposed interface
uses getFirst() and getLast().

Stephen