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

It depends on what guarantees you want to provide the user. If the data is sequential such that the order of the elements matter and you are allowing duplicates, then use a list. If order of elements does not matter and duplicates may or may not be allowed, then use a collection. Since you are actually returning the underlying collection you should not have both a get and set function, only a get function, since the returned collection may be mutated. Also, providing a set function allows the type of collection to be changed by the user, whereas you probably want for the particular type to be controlled by you.