Collection Content Behaviour Constraints

A quick and hopefully short post about collections again. Conveniently a nice little diagram I drew a while ago. It shows in a very colorful way the deficiencies in "Collection Content Behaviour Constraints" (the different constraints between List, Set, etc.) in the JDK collections and how it should (must) be done to do it properly.

Here it is: CollectionContentBehaviourConstraints.pdf.

This is only one of many aspects that are similarily problematic in the JDK collections. Others are broken equality mechanisms, broken failfast concept, missing fast but safe storage access (internal iteration), built-in weak referencing, uncontrolled grown but still insufficent collection increasing operations, immutable collections, etc.
I'll try to draw comparable diagrams to demonstrate them for the paper about my collections framework.


The fascinating thing about this diagram is: It's complete.
I tried multiple times very hard to come up with additional meaningful constraints (apart from thread safety, parallel execution, observability, etc. which belong to a completely different concearn group outside of content behaviour constraints). There aren't any more!
Okay there are Maps, OrderedMaps, SortedMaps, but those are all just optimized implementations for KeyValue-Sets with the key being the constraint-dominant element.
What else could there be? A constraint that says a collection MUST always contain duplicates? Or Triples? Nonsense. That would be just a List<Pair<E,E>> or something.
A collection that allows every element only to be added once and never again? Nonsense. Any even more weirder constraint? Nah...

So "order > sortation" and "duplicates <-> uniques" and that is it as far as content behaviour constraints are concearned.
Quite calming if you ask me, that there's one (tiny) field in informatics that is really "complete" and won't have to get extended and extended over and over in the future.
Even more sad so that it's not even nearly complete in the Java API's collections.