【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 al programming problem. Java uses the second approach, exclusively]. Every time you want to create an object, you use the new keyword to build a dynamic instance of that object. There39。s another issue, however, and that39。s the lifetime of an object. With languages that allow objects to be created on the stack, the piler determines how long the object lasts and can automatically destroy it. However, if you create it on the heap the piler has no knowledge of its lifetime. In a language like C++, you must determine programmatically when to destroy the object, which can lead to memory leaks if you don’t do it correctly (and this is a mon problem in C++ programs). Java provides a feature called a garbage collector that automatically discovers when an object is no longer in use and destroys it. A garbage collector is much more convenient because it reduces the number of issues that you must track and the code 7 you must write. More important, the garbage collector provides a much higher level of insurance against the insidious problem of memory leaks (which has brought many a C++ project to its knees). The rest of this section looks at additional factors concerning object lifetimes and landscapes. 1 . Collections and iterators If you don’t know how many objects you’re going to need to solve a particular problem, or how long they will last, you also don’t know how to store those objects. How can you know how much space to create for those objects? You can’t, since that information isn’t known until runtime. The solution to most problems in objectoriented design seems flippant: you create another type of object. The new type of object that solves this particular problem holds references to other objects. Of course, you can do the same thing with an array, which is available in most languages. But there’s more. This new object, generally called a container (also called a collection, but the Java library uses that term in a different sense so this book will use “container”), will expand itself whenever necessary to acmodate everything you place inside it. So you don’t need to know how manyobjects you’re going to hold in a container. Just create a container object and let it take care of the details. Fortunately, a good OOP language es with a set of containers as part of the package. In C++, it’s part of the Standard C++ Library and is sometimes called the Standard Template Library (STL). Object Pascal has containers in its Visual Component Library (VCL). Smalltalk has a very plete set of containers. Java also has containers in its standard library. In some libraries, a generic container is considered good enough for all needs, and in others (Java, for example) the library has different types of containers for different needs: a vector for consistent access to all elements, and a linked list for consistent insertion at all elements, for example, so you can choose the particular type that fits your needs. Container libraries may also include sets, queues, hash tables, trees, stacks, etc. All containers have some way to put things in and get things out。 there are usually functions to add elements to a container, and others to fetch those elements back out. But fetching elements can be more problematic, because a singleselection function is restrictive. What if you want to manipulate or pare a set of elements in the container instead of just one? The solution is an iterator, which is an object whose job is to select the elements within a container and present them to the user of the iterator. As a class, it also provides a level of abstraction. This abstraction can be used to separate the details of the container from the code that’s accessing that container. The container, via the iterator, is abstracted to be simply a sequence. The iterator allows you to traverse that sequence without worrying about the underlying structure—that is, whether it’s an ArrayList,