11.1: Introduction

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The collection classes form a loosely-defined group of general-purpose sub- classes of Collection and Stream. Many of these (like Bitmap, FileStream and CompiledMethod) are special-purpose classes crafted for use in other parts of the system or in applications, and hence not categorized as Collections by the system organization. For the purposes of this chapter, we use the term Collection Hierarchy to mean Collection and its subclasses that are also in the packages labelled Collections-*. We use the term Stream Hierarchy to mean Stream and its subclasses that are also in the Collections-Streams packages.

In this chapter we focus mainly on the subset of collection classes shown in Figure 11.2.1. Streams will be discussed separately in Chapter : Streams.