Question

When the enhanced for loop (foreach loop) was added to Java, it was made to work with a target of either an array or Iterable.

for ( T item : /*T[] or Iterable<? extends T>*/ ) {
    //use item
}

That works great for Collection classes that only implement one type of iteration, and thus have a single iterator() method.

But I find myself incredibly frustrated the odd time I want to use a non-standard iterator from a Collection class. For example, I was recently trying to help somebody use a Deque as a LIFO/stack but then print the elements in FIFO order. I was forced to do this:

for (Iterator<T> it = myDeque.descendingIterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {
   T item = it.next();
   //use item
}

I lose the advantages of the for-each loop. It’s not just about keystrokes. I don’t like exposing the iterator if I don’t have to, since it’s easy to make the mistake of calling it.next() twice, etc.

Now ideally I think the for-each loop should have accepted an Iterator as well. But it doesn’t. So is there an idiomatic way of using the for-each loop in these circumstances? I’d also love to hear suggestions that use common collections libraries like Guava.

The best I can come up with in absense of a helper method/class is:

for ( T item : new Iterable<T>() { public Iterator<T> iterator() { return myDeque.descendingIterator(); } } ) {
    //use item
}

Which isn’t worth using.

I’d love to see Guava have something like Iterables.wrap to make this idiomatic, but didn’t find anything like that. Obviously I could roll my own Iterator wrapper via a class or helper method. Any other ideas?

Edit: As a side-note, can anybody give a valid reason for why the enhanced for-loop shouldn’t have been able to just accept an Iterator? It would probably go a long way to making me live with the current design.

Answer 1

What I’d probably do is just make a utility class called Deques which could support this, along with other utilities if desired.

public class Deques {
  private Deques() {}

  public static <T> Iterable<T> asDescendingIterable(final Deque<T> deque) {
    return new Iterable<T>() {
      public Iterator<T> iterator() {
        return deque.descendingIterator();
      }
    }
  }
}

This is another case where it’s really too bad we don’t have lambdas and method references yet. In Java 8, you’ll be able to write something like this given that the method reference descendingIterator() matches the signature of Iterable:

Deque<String> deque = ...
for (String s : (Iterable<String>) deque::descendingIterator) { ... }