Re: Exception Names

From:

"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:04:03 -0700

Message-ID:

<yn9zl.4510$Lr6.1382@flpi143.ffdc.sbc.com>

Owen Jacobson wrote:

On 2009-03-27 11:29:24 -0400, "Mike Schilling"
<mscottschilling@hotmail.com> said:

Lew wrote:

rossum wrote:

On Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:58:20 +0000, Tom Anderson
<twic@urchin.earth.li> wrote:

InputStream.read should throw an EOFException instead of returning
-1 at the end of a stream. Checking return values for special
values is goofy C bullshit that we shouldn't be doing in the 21st
century.

It may bee goofy but it is very likely to be a whole lot faster.
Throwing and catching an exception is probably going to be a lot
slower than checking the return value.

Besides, there's nothing exceptional about reaching the end of a
stream. One would venture to say that one nearly always reaches the
end of a stream, *unless* something exceptional happens.

Right; the most Java-ish thing would be for Streams to be
iterator-like:

    while (stream.hasNext())
    {
        char c = stream.next();
    }

or even

    for (char c: stream)
    {
    }

Writing a StreamIterable adapter is fraught with annoying, though.
Consider: both .next() and .hasNext() *potentially* perform IO,
depending on whether you've already called hasNext when calling next.
And you can't throw any checked exceptions.

It's no worse than, say, creating a Collection backed by a disk file or
database. You have to wrap the exceptions with RuntimeExceptions. What I'm
not seeing a way around is being able to return a char rather than having to
wrap them as Characters. I suppose you could create a CharacterHolder that
isn't immutable and return the same instance with different contents each
time, but that seems cheesy.