Why aren't Enumerations Iterable?

Question

In Java 5 and above you have the foreach loop, which works magically on anything that implements Iterable:

for (Object o : list) {
  doStuff(o);         


        

Answer 1

It doesn't make sense for Enumeration to implement Iterable. Iterable is a factory method for Iterator. Enumeration is analogous to Iterator, and only maintains state for a single enumeration.

So, be careful trying to wrap an Enumeration as an Iterable. If someone passes me an Iterable, I will assume that I can call iterator() on it repeatedly, creating as many Iterator instances as I want, and iterating independently on each. A wrapped Enumeration will not fulfill this contract; don't let your wrapped Enumeration escape from your own code. (As an aside, I noticed that Java 7's DirectoryStream violates expectations in just this way, and shouldn't be allowed to "escape" either.)

Enumeration is like an Iterator, not an Iterable. A Collection is Iterable. An Iterator is not.

You can't do this:

Vector<X> list = …
Iterator<X> i = list.iterator();
for (X x : i) {
    x.doStuff();
}

So it wouldn't make sense to do this:

Vector<X> list = …
Enumeration<X> i = list.enumeration();
for (X x : i) {
    x.doStuff();
}

There is no Enumerable equivalent to Iterable. It could be added without breaking anything to work in for loops, but what would be the point? If you are able to implement this new Enumerable interface, why not just implement Iterable instead?

Answer 2

Enumeration hasn't been modified to support Iterable because it's an interface not a concrete class (like Vector, which was modifed to support the Collections interface).

If Enumeration was changed to support Iterable it would break a bunch of people's code.

Answer 3

AFAIK Enumeration is kinda "deprecated":

Iterator takes the place of Enumeration in the Java collections framework

I hope they'll change the Servlet API with JSR 315 to use Iterator instead of Enumeration.

Answer 4

As an easy and clean way of using an Enumeration with the enhanced for loop, convert to an ArrayList with java.util.Collections.list.

for (TableColumn col : Collections.list(columnModel.getColumns()) {

(javax.swing.table.TableColumnModel.getColumns returns Enumeration.)

Note, this may be very slightly less efficient.

Answer 5

If you would just like it to be syntactically a little cleaner, you can use:

while(e.hasMoreElements()) {
  doStuff(e.nextElement());
}