There is certainly room for both approaches, and reading from a stream is the more logical time to stop at the end of valid input. There are times when I know the stream should be at its end, and I test for that in those cases. Dolphin contains some *ToText classes that do some very useful things (supporting both direction via #leftToRight: and #rightToLeft:), especially DateToText and TimeToText, which have a #format aspect. It's not really the same problem, but worth keeping in mind as we tackle this. The short version, +1. Bill ________________________________________ From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] on behalf of Nicolas Cellier [nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 12:07 PM To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list; Pharo Development Subject: [Pharo-project] readFrom: vs readFromString: There is a huge mess in #readFrom: implementation. Some classes will signal trailing characters as a bug, some other won't and will simply leave the stream positioned after the valid part. I propose to change this behaviour uniformly: - readFrom: aStream will never fail on trailing chars (hey, it's a stream, it's up to sender to interpret the tail) - readFromString: aString will always forbid trailing char (it's not a stream, so this garbage is most probably an error and cannot be ignored silently) What do you think ? Nicolas