Streams design strawman

[Rémi Forax]

On 04/22/2012 04:52 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:
> Think "histograms."  The idea is you are taking a stream of values and 
> categorizing them.  Say you have a collection of classes.  One way to 
> do this is by returning a map-stream:
>
>   classes.groupBy(c -> c.getSuperClass())
>
> yields
>
>   Object => AbstractList, AbstractSet, AbstractMap
>   AbstractList => LinkedList, ArrayList
>
> etc.
>
> The "keys" of the new bi-stream are not (necessarily) elements of the 
> original stream; they are drawn from the range of the mapping function 
> passed to groupBy.
>
> We could synthesize this kind of group-by by composing a mapping 
> operation (map element to synthetic key), producing a stream of pairs, 
> and then a "collect" operation that collects elements mapped to a 
> given synthetic key, and that collection operation could concatenate 
> into a stream, count them up, etc.

So basically it's not a stream but something like this:

interface Histogram<K,V> {
   Iterable<K> keys();
   Iterable<V> values();
   Iterable<Entry<K,V>> entries();
}

a kind of super type of a Map.

Rémi