Primitive streams

[Brian Goetz]

> While many Java programmers are unfamiliar with reduce, there are many
> FP-aware folks (ruby, groovy, etc) who will want to transfer their
> favorite expressions to Java. We shouldn't go out of or way to make this
> transfer difficult.

No, we're not going to make this difficult.  Those already familiar with 
reduce should be pretty happy.

The question is, what should we do to accomodate the other 95% of java 
developers?  Giving them reduce *only* seems like throwing them in the 
deep end of the pool.

> Speaking of favorite expressions, how about char streams? A lot of
> functional kata are char based. But are there real  world examples where
> lack of CharStream would bite?  In any event don't lose IntStream.

Currently we expose
   String.chars()
   String.codePoints()

as IntStream.  If you want to deal with them as chars, you can downcast 
them to chars easily enough.  Doesn't seem like an important enough use 
case to have a whole 'nother set of streams.  (Same with Short, Byte, 
Float).