Java: why can't iterate over an iterator?

Question

I read Why is Java's Iterator not an Iterable? and Why aren't Enumerations Iterable?, but I still don't understand why this:

void foo(Iterator<X> it) {
  for (X x : it) {
    bar(x);
    baz(x);
  }
}

was not made possible. In other words, unless I'm missing something, the above could have been nice and valid syntactic sugar for:

void foo(Iterator<X> it) {
  for (X x; it.hasNext();) {
    x = it.next();
    bar(x);
    baz(x);
  }
}

Answer 1

Most likely the reason for this is because iterators are not reusable; you need to get a fresh Iterator from the Iterable collection each time you want to iterate over the elements. However, as a quick fix:

private static <T> Iterable<T> iterable(final Iterator<T> it){
     return new Iterable<T>(){ public Iterator<T> iterator(){ return it; } };
}

//....
{
     // ...
     // Now we can use:
     for ( X x : iterable(it) ){
        // do something with x
     }
     // ...
}
//....

That said, the best thing to do is simply pass around the Iterable<T> interface instead of Iterator<T>