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In computer programming, a collection is an abstract data type that is a grouping of items that can be used in a polymorphic way. Often, the items are of the same data type such as int or string . Sometimes the items derive from a common type; even deriving from the most general type of a programming language such as object or variant .
A collection may provide multiple iterators via its interface that provide items in different orders, such as forwards and backwards. An iterator is often implemented in terms of the structure underlying a collection implementation and is often tightly coupled to the collection to enable the operational semantics of the iterator.
This order is usually determined by the order in which the elements are added to the structure, but the elements can be rearranged in some contexts, such as sorting a list. For a structure that isn't ordered, on the other hand, no assumptions can be made about the ordering of the elements (although a physical implementation of these data types ...
Python supports most object oriented programming (OOP) techniques. It allows polymorphism, not only within a class hierarchy but also by duck typing. Any object can be used for any type, and it will work so long as it has the proper methods and attributes. And everything in Python is an object, including classes, functions, numbers and modules.
The C language does not have collections or a foreach construct. However, it has several standard data structures that can be used as collections, and foreach can be made easily with a macro. However, two obvious problems occur: The macro is unhygienic: it declares a new variable in the existing scope which remains after the loop.
Reference counting garbage collection is where each object has a count of the number of references to it. Garbage is identified by having a reference count of zero. An object's reference count is incremented when a reference to it is created and decremented when a reference is destroyed. When the count reaches zero, the object's memory is ...
As a collection algorithm, reference counting tracks, for each object, a count of the number of references to it held by other objects. If an object's reference count reaches zero, the object has become inaccessible, and can be destroyed. When an object is destroyed, any objects referenced by that object also have their reference counts decreased.
In computer science, a container is a class or a data structure [1] [2] whose instances are collections of other objects. In other words, they store objects in an organized way that follows specific access rules. The size of the container depends on the number of objects (elements) it contains.