Are there any guarantees in the JLS regarding the order in which stream operations are applied to the list elements?
The Streams library is not covered by the JLS. You would need to read the Javadoc for the library.
Streams also support parallel stream and the order in which things are processed depends on the implementations.
Applying the filter predicate to "bc" is not going to happen before applying the filter predicate to "a"?
It would be reasonable to assume that it would, but you can't guarantee it, nor should you be writing code which requires this guarantee otherwise you wouldn't be able to parallelise it later.
applying the mapping function to "def" is not going to happen before applying the mapping function to "a"?
It is safe assume this does happen, but you shouldn't write code which requires it.
