Got to admit. Got a little surprised when stream.ReadByte() returned an integer instead of a byte.

I believe so that they can return an EOF value

@DrEmann I'm not familiar with C# (Java instead and come C) but I think it would be better to just throw and EOFException and allow checking with something like stream.available() before?

You can represent an byte as int8

@LinusCDE you should not use exceptions for program flow - at least for "expected" cases like "end of file".
Exceptions are expensive in many languages.

@hawkes Not really in Java. Also if you take C, there you are required to check for stream.available(). And in Java you probably will put data streaming always in a try-catch because of e.g. IOException which is thrown if the connecting wasn't successful.

@hawkes it's Java

It uses exceptions for *everything* (even where they're not appropriate at all)

@hawkes it's Java
(hey, I thought I'd mention it)

Like parsing an integer. C# gets it right there, at least, thanks to out parameter support.