Why is there no SortedList in Java?

Question

In Java there are the SortedSet and SortedMap interfaces. Both belong to the Java Collections framework and provide a sorted way to access the elements.

However, in

Answer 1

I think all the above do not answer this question due to following reasons,

1. Since same functionality can be achieved by using other collections such as TreeSet, Collections, PriorityQueue..etc (but this is an alternative which will also impose their constraints i.e. Set will remove duplicate elements. Simply saying even if it does not impose any constraint, it does not answer the question why SortedList was not created by java community)
2. Since List elements do not implements compare/equals methods (This holds true for Set & Map also where in general items do not implement Comparable interface but when we need these items to be in sorted order & want to use TreeSet/TreeMap,items should implement Comparable interface)
3. Since List uses indexing & due to sorting it won't work (This can be easily handled introducing intermediate interface/abstract class)

but none has told the exact reason behind it & as I believe these kind of questions can be best answered by java community itself as it will have only one & specific answer but let me try my best to answer this as following,

As we know sorting is an expensive operation and there is a basic difference between List & Set/Map that List can have duplicates but Set/Map can not. This is the core reason why we have got a default implementation for Set/Map in form of TreeSet/TreeMap. Internally this is a Red Black Tree with every operation (insert/delete/search) having the complexity of O(log N) where due to duplicates List could not fit in this data storage structure.

Now the question arises we could also choose a default sorting method for List also like MergeSort which is used by Collections.sort(list) method with the complexity of O(N log N). Community did not do this deliberately since we do have multiple choices for sorting algorithms for non distinct elements like QuickSort, ShellSort, RadixSort...etc. In future there can be more. Also sometimes same sorting algorithm performs differently depending on the data to be sorted. Therefore they wanted to keep this option open and left this on us to choose. This was not the case with Set/Map since O(log N) is the best sorting complexity.