Collection interface

The collection interface defines the public interface that is common to Set and List collection classes. Map classes (such as HashMap and Hashtable) do not implement Collection, but are still considered part of the collection framework.

Collection

public interface Collection
extends Iterable

A collection represents a group of objects, known as its elements. Some collections allow duplicate elements and others do not. Some are ordered and others unordered.Implementations of more specific sub interfaces like Set and List are provided. This interface is typically used to pass collections around and manipulate them where maximum generality is desired.
Bags or multisets (unordered collections that may contain duplicate elements) should implement this interface directly.

Many methods in Collections Framework interfaces are defined in terms of the equals method. For example, the specification for the contains(Object o) method says: "returns true if and only if this collection contains at least one element e such that (o==null ? e==null : o.equals(e))." This specification should not be construed to imply that invoking Collection.contains with a non-null argument o will cause o.equals(e) to be invoked for any element e. Implementations are free to implement optimizations whereby the equals invocation is avoided, for example, by first comparing the hash codes of the two elements. (The Object.hashCode() specification guarantees that two objects with unequal hash codes cannot be equal.) More generally, implementations of the various Collections Framework interfaces are free to take advantage of the specified behavior of underlying Object methods wherever the implementor deems it appropriate.