Re: return an Iterator vs a List

[Adam Winer]

If the only reason is to enable the fun new "for" syntax,
then we should change the type from Iterator to Iterable,
instead of List.  List is a much larger contract.

-- Adam


On 3/28/07, Jeanne Waldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi there,
I'm in the Skinning StyleNode code and I see that the 'get' methods
return Iterators
from the good ol' days.
It seems to me that it is better if they just return Lists so the code
that iterates over
the values is cleaner using 5.0's for(String foo : yyy) construct.
Does anyone see why I wouldn't want these to return List instead of
Iterator?

Here's a code snippet. Thanks, Jeanne
--

  public Iterator<IncludePropertyNode> getIncludedProperties()
  {
    if(_includedProperties == null)
    {
      List<IncludePropertyNode> list = Collections.emptyList();
      return list.iterator();
    }
    else
      return (Arrays.asList(_includedProperties)).iterator();
  }

  /**
   * Gets the properties specified by this node's parent that should be
   * ignored. This method will return an empty iterator if
   * [EMAIL PROTECTED] #isInhibitingAll()} returns <code>true</code>
   *
   * @return an iterator over the properties that should be ignored, an
   *         empty iterator if all properties should be.
   */
  public Iterator<String> getInhibitedProperties()
  {
    if(_inhibitedProperties == null)
    {
      List<String> list = Collections.emptyList();
      return list.iterator();
    }
    else
    {
      return _inhibitedProperties.iterator();
    }
  }