Containers: An Object Behavior Specification

Chapter 3 presented an object behavior specification of the list class and explained the advantages of such a specification. We saw that there are many ways to implement list behaviors — in particular, sequential and parallel implementations differ radically. In Chapter 1 we mentioned that containers are basic classes that help store, retrieve and organize interacting objects. We said then that containers were generalized forms of lists. Actually, once we have freed ourselves from thinking in sequential processing terms, we can start with container as the more basic concept and derive lists as one of the special subclasses that happen to be natural for sequential processing but are not really fundamental in general.