OrderedCollections not supported in WriteStream.

> In an earlier post it was noted that WriteStream does not support having
> its
> collection instance variable being an instance of OrderedCollection;
> the Problem being that OrderedCollection does not support:
>
>        #at:index put: object
>
> where the index is beyond the lastIndex instance variable
> of the orderedCollection object.
>
> I suggest that if the value of index  is one beyond  the value of
> lastIndex then
> the orderCollection object do an add operation and otherwise behave as
> before.
>
> This would fix the problem with WriteStream
> but I suppose this violates some principle somewhere.
>
> For me the complaint is that now you have the WriteStream instance
> managing the size of its collection and if its collection is an instance of
> OrderedCollection the collection is also managing its own size.
>
> For the record:
> What are the reasons that WriteStream was not designed
> to use OrderedCollection as the class of its
> (then internally instanciated and private) collection instance variable
> anyway?
> This would have made the implementation of WriteStream MUCH simpler.
>
> One could argue that this would prevent  the collection being some kind
> of growable
> linked list structure.  But since WriteStream already does a complete
> copy every
> time it decides the collection is too small this doesn't seem very
> important to me.
>
> Of course, since the user passes the initial collection to the
> WriteStream object,
> he also has access to the collection which he would then lose.
> But it is not clear to me why the user should have direct access to the
> collection at all.
> Of course, for PositionalStream objects, the user would still need
> to pass in a collection object but WriteStream could override this
> behavior.
>
> The biggest problem I see with modifying WriteStream to work this way is
> that currently the user determines the class of the object returned by the
> contents method of WriteStream.  With this change the class of the object
> returned would be decided by WriteStream.
>
> If WriteStream were modified to work this way would anything in Squeak
> break?
> Of course somewhere some squeak user would get burned but since I think
> such users have written BAD code I am not too sympathetic.
>
> Reasons why the whole idea is just plain bad are perfectly welcome.
> (And who's going to stop you from pointing them out anyway.)
>
>
> Ralph Boland
>
>
>
>
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