rename 'Iterable' to 'Stream' w/o breaking code

Alright, so here’s a thing I’ve wanted to do forever. It turns out that Iterable is a really terrible name for the things we call “streams”. The whole perspective of working with streams is to not think of procedurally “iterating” over them. Now, sure, Ceylon’s Iterable historically grew out of something that filled the same role as Java’s interface of the same name, but it has grown into something quite different.

Now, we could renameIterable to Stream without breaking any existing source code simply by creating an alias for it:

shared interface Iterable<out Element=Anything,
                          out Absent=Null> 
        given Absent satisfies Null
        => Stream<Element,Absent>;

We could even make it binary compatible by simply munging the name Stream back to Iterable in the backend, but at this point I’m not sure that’s even worth the effort, since we’re breaking binary compatibility in the next release anyway.

Thoughts?

[gavinking]

hey, y’know what would be the coolest thing ever?

A renamed annotation that:

• tells the typechecker and model loaders to automatically generate an alias with the old name of a decaration,
• tells the backends to keep using the old name in compiled code, and
• tells the IDEs to prompt to rename to the new name.

renamed ("Iterable")
shared interface Stream<out Element=Anything,
                          out Absent=Null> 
        given Absent satisfies Null { ... }

That would be cool and not even very hard to implement!

[jvasileff]

Based on the above two comments, I suppose that between Iterable and Iterator, it makes more sense for Iterator to be renamed to Stream than for Iterable to be renamed.

Stream is a really nice name, and I think it would be a waste to use it on something so useless as an Iterator, which is primarily just a temporary object used by for loops. And even if Stream isn’t otherwise used, I’m not sure giving Iterators a nice name would do anything other than encourage overuse (misuse).