Is it better to use List or Collection?

Question

I have an object that stores some data in a list. The implementation could change later, and I don\'t want to expose the internal implementation to the end user. However, the us

Answer 1

Using the most general type, which is Collection, makes the most sense unless there is some explicit reason to use the more specific type - List. But whatever you do, if this is an API for public consumption be clear in the documentation what it does; if it returns a shallow copy of the collection say so.