Hi Jakob,
wellcome to the club of peekBack deceived
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2014-July/179285.html

we can't reasonnably drag too many of these inconsistencies...

2017-06-22 5:48 GMT+02:00 Ben Coman <btc at openinworld.com>:

> When I read that first line of your post, my impression/expectation was
> the same as yours.
> Intuitively #back and #peekBack should return the same value.
> But my comments are face-value only, without a deep familiarity of
> streams.  Maybe someone else can provide historical & future context.
>
> Presuming it was broadly accepted this "should" be the behaviour of
> #peekBack, the problem with changing its behaviour is the effect on
> existing users, and also cross-dialect compatability. "Ideally" Squeak/Cuis
> would be ammendable to such a change, and then one approach could be a
> little dance using an interim #peekBackFromCursor so the existing #peekBack
> can be deprecated for one version (to avoid silent corruption of
> application logic) then restoring #peekBack with the new behaviour.    A
> slow process, but such small changes accumulate over time to improve things.
>
> Alternatively, we just leave #peekBack as-is and permanently introduce
> #peekBackFromCursor or similar.
> Maybe such changes would be superseded by XStreams anyway (not really a
> reason stop improving current system anyway.)
>
> cheers -ben
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 9:00 PM, Jakob Reschke <
> jakob.reschke at student.hpi.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I just stumbled upon the behavior of #peekBack. I expected that it
>> would give me a "preview" of what I would get when I send #back, but
>> without changing the position of the Stream (like #peek does for
>> #next). Or in other words, I expected to get the last read (or
>> written) element.
>>
>> As it turned out it answers the next-to-last element instead. There
>> even is a test case in RWBinaryOrTextStreamTest for this behavior.
>>
>> But does it make sense? I have my doubts mainly because of the
>> inconsistency with the return value of #back.
>>
>> There is also #peekLast, which does what I expected, but it is only
>> defined for File- and WriteStream and the comment says it is intended
>> to get the last put element, not a last read/extracted/next-ed
>> element.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Jakob
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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