Why there is no BooleanConsumer in Java 8?

Question

I\'m afraid that this is somewhat a silly question.

Is there anybody can tell me why there is no BooleanConsumer opposite to BooleanSupplier?

Is the

Answer 1

As other answers indicate there is no great reason to avoid Consumer, but then there's no great reason to avoid Supplier either, so a different explanation is required for this.

A similar question is why can't you switch on a boolean value. The answer is that there's no need because you could always use if or if else.

A BooleanConsumer would really be nothing more than an if else construct because the accept() method for a BooleanConsumer could always be written in this form:

if (v) {
    // Do something
} else {
    // Do something else
}

If you needed to pass such code around as data, you could just pass a pair of Runnables representing "do something" and "do something else". In many cases, you would only need one of the Runnables because one of the two blocks above would be empty.

In the same way, there is no need for a BooleanPredicate because it would be nothing more than a pair of BooleanSuppliers and there is no need for a a BooleanFunction because it would be nothing more than a pair of Suppliers.

In contrast to this, it is not possible to break a BooleanSupplier into two simpler objects.