Why is EventListenerList traversed backwards in fireFooXXX()?

Question

I don\'t understand the rationale of this code, taken from javax.swing.event.EventListenerList docs:

protected void fireFooXXX() {
    // Guaranteed to retur         


        

Answer 1

1. Probably performance considerations: backwards iteration is faster because comparison with 0 is a single machine code instruction - lots of former C programmers have that ingrained even though it's rather irrelevant nowadays. Note that there is no guarantee about the order in which listeners will be notified anyway.
2. Look at the rest of the class - it stores the listeners' types as well to provide type safety.