Possible Duplicate:
Why were Java collections implemented with “optional methods” in the interface?
I was looking at the javadoc for Collections and I noticed the unmodifiableCollection/unmodifiableList/etc. methods and I thought to myself, could this API be better?
Here's one of the API signatures:
public static <T> List<T> unmodifiableList(List<? extends T> list)
If you're not too familiar with Java Generics, you can think of it this way:
public static List unmodifiableList(List list)
And the Javadoc says
Returns an unmodifiable view of the specified list. This method allows modules to provide users with "read-only" access to internal lists. Query operations on the returned list "read through" to the specified list, and attempts to modify the returned list, whether direct or via its iterator, result in an UnsupportedOperationException.
Specifically I'm questioning the decision to return a List interface. Why not return a new interface named UnmodifiableList? The upside is you could make your APIs self documenting. The way it is now, a programmer will have to wait until runtime or read documentation to realize he's using the list wrong. He could have written a lot of code by then.
