Make BaseStream public?

[Paul Sandoz]

On Jul 1, 2013, at 10:39 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at Oracle.COM> wrote:

> I am currently crawling through the docs getting ready for another pass on the specification.  The good news is that the class hierarchy has simplified a lot since the first pass.  The bad news is I am trying to tack a course between the twin evils of duplicated documentation and excessive linking (each level of linking loses some percentage of the readers.)
> 
> The classes Stream, IntStream, LongStream, and DoubleStream all implement BaseStream, which describes behaviors common to all streams (closeability, iterator/spliterator, sequential/parallel, ordering). Currently BaseStream is package-private, but I am thinking that it might be valuable to elevate it to public, for possibly two reasons:
> 
> - Having a common supertype allows library code to abstract over all stream types.  Our tests use this ability, for example.
> 
> - Most of the documentation for the stream classes (sequential and parallel behavior, ordering, etc) is generic to all stream types, so putting it in one base class (where it can be @inheritDoc'ed or linked) is more natural than cutting and pasting it in N places, or dumping it all in the package doc.
> 

+1

If/when there is an SPI there could be value in making a test framework available publicly as well without resorting to boot classpath tricks.

I am struggling to recall why we did not do that earlier. At one point we had some methods/types on BaseStream we did not want to expose publicly, but they all withered away as the implementation got simpler.

Paul.