Review request for initial lambda functions and utils

[Neal Gafter]

Perhaps I don't fully understand the semantics of Blocks.repeatUntil.  It
appears to repeatedly invoke the predicate on the same value of t.  Is it
supposed to be passing different values of t to the predicate, or is the
predicate really expected to return the same value each time?  If it is the
same value of t each time, why is the predicate invoked repeatedly?  Why is
the value of t not captured within the lambda in the caller?

If the predicate can change its returned value, then I find the existence of
facilities like Blocks.repeatUntil - inherently sequential and relying on
side-effects - really surprising in the context of project Lambda.  So far
project Lambda has held as one of its design principles supporting
inherently parallelizable facilities (which means side-effect-free
lambdas).  That is, as I understand it, the reason that lambdas cannot
access mutable locals.  An inherently sequential method such as repeatUntil
would be more consistent with a language design in which lambdas can access
mutable locals.

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 8:02 PM, Mike Duigou <mike.duigou at oracle.com> wrote:

> Late last week I committed an initial version of the proposed standard
> basic lambda functions and some utils for those functions to the OpenJDK
> lambda repository. The implementation (especially the oh-so-tedious-javadoc
> and unit tests) is still very rough but we are interested in hearing
> feedback. For now focus your feedback on:
>
> - approach
>    - Is there a different way to solve the problem?
> - completeness
>    - What *must* be there that is missing?
> - stylistic/usage issues
>    - Copying inputs vs to not copy inputs--see Predicates.contains() vs.
> Predicates.or(Predicate<T>... )
> - surprising behaviour
>    - self-inconsistency or surprising behaviour with respect to other Java
> APIs.
> - usage problems
>    - I can't use this to X
>
> This API will see incremental progress in the next couple of weeks. Over
> time other useful bits such as extension methods for Collection, List, Set
> utilizing lambda functions will also appear.
>
> Mike
>
>