@mdrob The reason to use an Iterator is that, from my experience, Stream requires all the base objects to be in existence. In addition there are times when you don't know how many objects there will be or that you have an iterator or iterable to start with and not a stream. An example would be reading from something like an S3 bucket where you make a call to get a list of object summaries. The list of object summaries may not be complete and so you have to make more calls to the API to get more and more object summaries. This is very easy to wrap with an iterator that will allow you to get all the object summaries and then you can do stream-like processing on the object summaries to process all the files in the S3 bucket.
@Gary Gregory <garydgreg...@gmail.com> I have an implementation of this class in the a pull request for Rat 0.17. It is effectively a wrapper on some of the other iterator classes in commons-collections. With your example of how to do the unwinding/flattening iterator I can now rewrite it so that it does not need any other new classes in commons-collections. I am open to renaming methods as appropriate. I will put together a pull request on Sunday that shows how to implement the methods and will make method name changes as per your recommendations above. Claude
