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While going through the ways of converting primitive arrays to Streams, I found that char[] are not supported while other primitive array types are supported. Any particular reason to leave them out in the stream?
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stream() method only works for primitive arrays of int[], long[], and double[] type, and returns IntStream, LongStream and DoubleStream respectively. For other primitive types, Arrays. stream() won't work.
The stream(T[] array) method of Arrays class in Java, is used to get a Sequential Stream from the array passed as the parameter with its elements. It returns a sequential Stream with the elements of the array, passed as parameter, as its source.
Of course, the answer is "because that's what the designers decided". There is no technical reason why CharStream could not exist.
If you want justification, you usually need to turn the the OpenJDK mailing list*. The JDK's documentation is not in the habit of justifying why anything is why it is.
Someone asked
Using IntStream to represent char/byte stream is a little inconvenient. Should we add CharStream and ByteStream as well?
The reply from Brian Goetz (Java Language Architect) says
Short answer: no.
It is not worth another 100K+ of JDK footprint each for these forms which are used almost never. And if we added those, someone would demand short, float, or boolean.
Put another way, if people insisted we had all the primitive specializations, we would have no primitive specializations. Which would be worse than the status quo.
Source
He also says the same elsewhere
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).
Source
TL;DR: Not worth the maintenance cost.
*In case you're curious, the google query I used was
site:http://mail.openjdk.java.net/ charstream If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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