Why do we have contains(Object o) instead of contains(E e)?

Question

Is it to maintain backwards compatibility with older (un-genericized) versions of Collection? Or is there a more subtle detail that I am missing? I see this pattern repeated in remove also (remove(Object o)), but add is genericized as add(E e).

Answer 1

It is because the contains function utilizes the equals function, and the equals function is defined in the base Object class with a signature of equals(Object o) rather than equals(E e) (since not all classes are generic). Same case with the remove function - it traverses the collection using the equals function which takes an Object argument.

This doesn't directly explain the decision however, as they could've still used type E and allowed it to be automatically cast to type Object on the call to equals; but I imagine they wanted to allow the function to be called on other Object types. There's nothing wrong with having a Collection<Foo> c; and then calling c.contains(somethingOfTypeBar) - it will always return false, and so it eliminates the need for a cast to type Foo (which can throw an exception) or, to protect from the exception, a typeof call. So you can imagine if you're iterating over something with mixed types and calling contains on each of the elements, you can simply use the contains function on all of them rather than needing guards.

It's actually reminiscent of the "newer" loosely-typed languages, when you look at it that way...

Answer 2

Answered here.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/104799/why-arent-java-collections-remove-methods-generic
In short, they wanted to maximize backwards compatibility, because collections have been introduced long before generics.

And to add from me: the video he's referring is worth watching.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDN_EYUvUq0

update
To clarify, the man who said that (in the video) was one of the people who updated java maps and collections to use generics. If he doesn't know, then who.

Answer 3

Because otherwise it could have only be compared to the exact match of parameter type, specifically wildcarded collections would have stopped working, e.g.

class Base
{
}

class Derived
  extends Base
{
}

Collection< ? extends Base > c = ...;

Derived d = ...;

Base base_ref = d;

c.contains( d ); // Would have produced compile error

c.contains( base_ref ); // Would have produced compile error

EDIT
For doubters who think that's not one of the reasons, here is a modified array list with a would be generified contains method

class MyCollection< E > extends ArrayList< E >
{
    public boolean myContains( E e )
    {
        return false;
    }
}

MyCollecttion< ? extends Base > c2 = ...;

c2.myContains( d ); // does not compile
c2.myContains( base_ref ); // does not compile

Basically contains( Object o ) is a hack to make this very common use case to work with Java Generics.

Answer 4

contains() takes an Object because the object it matches does not have to be the same type as the object that you pass in to contains(); it only requires that they be equal. From the specification of contains(), contains(o) returns true if there is an object e such that (o==null ? e==null : o.equals(e)) is true. Note that there is nothing requiring o and e to be the same type. This follows from the fact that the equals() method takes in an Object as parameter, not just the same type as the object.

Although it may be commonly true that many classes have equals() defined so that its objects can only be equal to objects of its own class, that is certainly not always the case. For example, the specification for List.equals() says that two List objects are equal if they are both Lists and have the same contents, even if they are different implementations of List. So coming back to the example in this question, it is possible to have a Collection<ArrayList> and for me to call contains() with a LinkedList as argument, and it might return true if there is a list with the same contents. This would not be possible if contains() were generic and restricted its argument type to E.

In fact, the fact that contains() takes any object as an argument allows an interesting use where you can to use it to test for the existence of an object in the collection that satisfies a certain property:

Collection<Integer> integers;
boolean oddNumberExists = integers.contains(new Object() {
    public boolean equals(Object e) {
        Integer i = (Integer)e;
        if (i % 2 != 0) return true;
        else return false;
    }
});

Answer 5

"does that basket of apples contain this orange?"

clearly a TRUE answer cannot be given. but that still leaves too possibilities:

1. the answer is FALSE.
2. the question is not well formed, it should not pass compile.

the collection api chose the 1st one. but the 2nd choice would also make perfect sense. a question like that is a bullshit question 99.99% of times, so don't even ask!