
Gordon> OK, it's a pipe, and one iterator wants to go past Gordon> what's been received. Is that iterator at EOF? Not Gordon> really, just "temporary EOF". So should it block? Gordon> But I'm single threaded and receiving asynchronously. Gordon> Oh, and it turns out to be a humongous download, Gordon> and what happens if the buffering mechanism runs Gordon> out of memory / disk space. Does my process die? Gordon> Aargh. Too much magic. Too many corner cases. The implementation of the file should have a choice: Either refuse to yield a multiple iterator (which seems to be your preference) or yield one that works (which might or might not be my preference, depending on circumstances). In the latter case, I don't think your questions are hard to answer, because most of the answers fall out of the single-iterator case. So if the iterator is at EOF, it should either block or not, depending on what a single iterator should so. The only real question is what happens if the buffering mechanism runs out of space, but that's always a question for such mechanisms; I don't see why it's any more irksome in this particular context.