AbstractSet<E>

This class provides a skeletal implementation of the Set interface to minimize the effort required to implement this interface.

The process of implementing a set by extending this class is identical to that of implementing a Collection by extending AbstractCollection, except that all of the methods and constructors in subclasses of this class must obey the additional constraints imposed by the Set interface (for instance, the add method must not permit addition of multiple intances of an object to a set).

Note that this class does not override any of the implementations from the AbstractCollection class. It merely adds implementations for equals and hashCode.

This class is a member of the Java Collections Framework.

Since: 1.2

Version: 1.23, 06/22/03

Author: Josh Bloch Neal Gafter

Constructor Summary
protected	AbstractSet() Sole constructor.

Method Summary
boolean	equals(Object o) Compares the specified object with this set for equality.
int	hashCode() Returns the hash code value for this set.
boolean	removeAll(Collection<?> c) Removes from this set all of its elements that are contained in the specified collection (optional operation).

Constructor Detail

AbstractSet

Sole constructor. (For invocation by subclass constructors, typically implicit.)

Method Detail

equals

Compares the specified object with this set for equality. Returns true if the given object is also a set, the two sets have the same size, and every member of the given set is contained in this set. This ensures that the equals method works properly across different implementations of the Set interface.

This implementation first checks if the specified object is this set; if so it returns true. Then, it checks if the specified object is a set whose size is identical to the size of this set; if not, it it returns false. If so, it returns containsAll((Collection) o).

Parameters: o Object to be compared for equality with this set.

Returns: true if the specified object is equal to this set.

hashCode

Returns the hash code value for this set. The hash code of a set is defined to be the sum of the hash codes of the elements in the set. This ensures that s1.equals(s2) implies that s1.hashCode()==s2.hashCode() for any two sets s1 and s2, as required by the general contract of Object.hashCode.

This implementation enumerates over the set, calling the hashCode method on each element in the collection, and adding up the results.

Returns: the hash code value for this set.

removeAll

Removes from this set all of its elements that are contained in the specified collection (optional operation).

This implementation determines which is the smaller of this set and the specified collection, by invoking the size method on each. If this set has fewer elements, then the implementation iterates over this set, checking each element returned by the iterator in turn to see if it is contained in the specified collection. If it is so contained, it is removed from this set with the iterator's remove method. If the specified collection has fewer elements, then the implementation iterates over the specified collection, removing from this set each element returned by the iterator, using this set's remove method.

Note that this implementation will throw an UnsupportedOperationException if the iterator returned by the iterator method does not implement the remove method.

Parameters: c elements to be removed from this set.

Returns: true if this set changed as a result of the call.

Throws: UnsupportedOperationException removeAll is not supported by this set. NullPointerException if the specified collection is null.