content: package net.agkn.hll.serialization;
  
  /*
   * Copyright 2013 Aggregate Knowledge, Inc.
   *
   * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
   * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   * You may obtain a copy of the License at
   *
   *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
   *
   * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   * limitations under the License.
   */
  
  /**
   * Reads 'words' of a fixed width, in sequence, from a byte array.
   *
   * @author timon
   */
  public interface IWordDeserializer {
      /**
       * @return the next word in the sequence. Should not be called more than
       * {@link #totalWordCount()} times.
       */
      long readWord();
  
      /**
       * Returns the number of words that could be encoded in the sequence.<p/>
       *
       * NOTE:  the sequence that was encoded may be shorter than the value this
       *        method returns due to padding issues within bytes. This guarantees
       *        only an upper bound on the number of times {@link #readWord()}
       *        can be called.
       *
       * @return the maximum number of words that could be read from the sequence.
       */
      int totalWordCount();
  }