These functions were changed from private to protected in 99f2a27553 but the comments were not updated at that time.
In conjunction with equivalent pull requests to Arduino SAM Boards and Arduino SAMD Boards, solves https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/issues/6146.
This method originally flushed pending input bytes, which makes sense in
Stream. At some point it was changed to flush output bytes instead, but
it was never moved to Print to reflect this.
Since Stream inherits from Print, this should not really affect any
users of the Stream or Print classes. However to prevent problems with
existing implementations of the Print class that do not provide a
flush() implementation, a default implementation is provided. We should
probably remove this at some point in the future, though.
Stream::parseInt & Stream::parseFloat previously had protected
overloads which allowed skipping a custom character. This commit
brings this feature to the public interface.
To keep the public API simpler, the single paramter overload remains
protected. However its functionality is available in the public
interface using the two parameter overload.
Its default is SKIP_ALL which reflects previous versions.
However SKIP_NONE, and SKIP_WHITESPACE can refine this behaviour.
A parameter used in the protected overloads of parseInt/Float has been
changed from `skipChar` to `ignore`.
This isn't necessarily a particularly efficient implementation (it
allocates memory one character at a time and so may lead to
fragmentation) but it seems to work.
http://code.google.com/p/arduino/issues/detail?id=454
This should allow us more flexibility in determining how to handle these functions later. For example, in specifying that initial characters shouldn't be skipped.
http://code.google.com/p/arduino/issues/detail?id=698
This from Michael's TextFinder library, incorporated into the Stream class: find(), findUntil(), parseInt(), parseFloat(), readChars(), readCharsUntil(), readCharsBetween(), setTimeout().