Data Structures
Java has classes for a rich set of data structures.
- Once arrays are created, they cannot change size. But the class Vector can increase and decrease in size by adding and deleting elements.
- Strings cannot be changed at all once they are created. The Stringbuffer class does allow to change the contents in place.
- The class HashTable creates a structure that maps keys to values.
- A subclass of HashTable is Properties, which can create and manipulate property lists.
- There is a class Stack for traditional stack structures.
- There are classes for Dates and Calendars.
- There are classes StringTokenizer and StreamTokenizer which usefully parse strings or streams to take out floating point numbers and identifiers as single entities.