Yet another run at reduce (collect)

[Tim Peierls]

Yes! "collect" is good. I had been translating "reduce" into "collect"
already in my head.

Of course then I'd want Reducers (Collectors?) like "toMap" and "toList" to
be "intoMap" and "intoList".

--tim

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 6:12 AM, Doug Lea <dl at cs.oswego.edu> wrote:

>
> While scoping out this form of solution, Brian noticed that the
> new collecting form of reduce is overload-hostile to
> one of the existing reduce methods. (that is, has the same arity
> and has mutually-confusable lambda args.) Having been traumatized
> by this problem last week, I think we need to do something about this.
> He is not yet convinced that we will need to change this. I am.
>
> I propose renaming this form "collect", and the corresponding
> interface to Collector. The underlying concept here is,
> in Fortress-ese, catamorphic reduction, but the closest
> non-weird term is "collect". Much closer than "accumulate".
>
> And further, I think this is a net positive win in terms of
> understandability. For example:
>
>    reduce(intoList()) => collect(intoList())
>
> The name provides a pleasant and appropriate clue that it is
> something often applicable to Collections.
>
> Try it out on other examples.
> I think you will like it better unless you are Brian :-)
>
> And if we don't do this, people will be getting mile-long
> overload ambiguity messages from Javac in surprising
> contexts.
>
> -Doug
>
>
>