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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 .
The collection can store elements in any manner while the consumer can access them as a sequence. In object-oriented programming, an iterator class is usually designed in tight coordination with the corresponding collection class. Usually, the collection provides the methods for creating iterators.
In Raku, a sister language to Perl, for must be used to traverse elements of a list (foreach is not allowed). The expression which denotes the collection to loop over is evaluated in list-context, but not flattened by default, and each item of the resulting list is, in turn, aliased to the loop variable(s). List literal example:
Java has had a standard interface for implementing iterators since its early days, and since Java 5, the "foreach" construction makes it easy to loop over objects that provide the java.lang.Iterable interface. (The Java collections framework and other collections frameworks, typically provide iterators for all collections.)
Container classes are expected to implement CRUD-like methods to do the following: create an empty container (constructor); insert objects into the container; delete objects from the container; delete all the objects in the container (clear); access the objects in the container; access the number of objects in the container (count).
Apple provides the NSCountedSet class as part of Cocoa, and the CFBag and CFMutableBag types as part of CoreFoundation. Python's standard library includes collections.Counter, which is similar to a multiset. Smalltalk includes the Bag class, which can be instantiated to use either identity or equality as predicate for inclusion test.
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, counting sort is an algorithm for sorting a collection of objects according to keys that are small positive integers; that is, it is an integer sorting algorithm. It operates by counting the number of objects that possess distinct key values, and applying prefix sum on those counts to determine the positions of each key ...