Spliterator

public interface Spliterator

An object for traversing and partitioning elements of a source. The source of elements covered by a Spliterator could be, for example, an array, a Collection, an IO channel, or a generator function.

A Spliterator may traverse elements individually (tryAdvance()) or sequentially in bulk (forEachRemaining()).

A Spliterator may also partition off some of its elements (using trySplit()) as another Spliterator, to be used in possibly-parallel operations. Operations using a Spliterator that cannot split, or does so in a highly imbalanced or inefficient manner, are unlikely to benefit from parallelism. Traversal and splitting exhaust elements; each Spliterator is useful for only a single bulk computation.

A Spliterator also reports a set of characteristics() of its structure, source, and elements from among ORDERED, DISTINCT, SORTED, SIZED, NONNULL, IMMUTABLE, CONCURRENT, and SUBSIZED. These may be employed by Spliterator clients to control, specialize or simplify computation. For example, a Spliterator for a Collection would report SIZED, a Spliterator for a Set would report DISTINCT, and a Spliterator for a SortedSet would also report SORTED. Characteristics are reported as a simple unioned bit set. Some characteristics additionally constrain method behavior; for example