[Biojava-l] Remove features from a sequence

[Thomas Down]

Once upon a time, Keith James wrote:
> 
> It may also be worth noting that you /can/ do this:
> 
> while (seqI.hasNext())
> {
>     Sequence seq = seqI.nextSequence();
> 
>     for (Iterator i = seq.features(); i.hasNext();)
>     {
>         i.next();
>         i.remove();
>     }
> }
> 
> which is a way to avoid ConcurrentModificationException, but also a
> way to avoid informing any listeners to Sequence that all its Features
> have been stripped - and is likely to be bad.

Ugh, that's actually pretty nasty, to the extent that I would
call it a bug.  My initial thought was to fix it by firing the
appropriate events, but this doesn't work since the Iterator.remove()
method can't throw a ChangeVetoException.  So the options are:

   - Hack it (throw something like IllegalStateException)
 
   - Add ChangeVetoRuntimeException (seems like a Bad Thing to
     me since we've always said that change vetoes are checked
     exceptions up until now.

   - Forbid Iterator.remove().  Easiest to code, but seems like
     a shame.

None of these options seems terribly appetizing to me, but I
think we should do something.

Any preferences?
 
    Thomas.