Collection Classes

The primary classes—NSArray, NSSet, and NSDictionary—share a number of features in common:

• They can hold only objects, but the objects can be of any type. An instance of NSArray, for example, could contain cats, dogs, or wombats, or any combination of these.

• They maintain strong references to their contents.

• They are immutable, but have a mutable subclass that allows you to change the contents of the collection.

• You can iterate over their contents using NSEnumerator or fast enumeration.

Cocoa also provides three classes—NSPointerArray, NSHashTable, and NSMapTable—that are modeled on these classes but that differ in the following ways:

• They may contain elements other than objects.

• They offer other memory management options.

• They are mutable.

Since a Cocoa collection object can hold any sort of object (unlike collections in some other environments), you typically don’t create special collection classes to contain objects of a particular type.

Ordering Schemes

Collections store and vend other objects in a particular ordering scheme:

• NSArray and its mutable subclass NSMutableArray use zero-based indexing.

  In other environments, an array may be called a vector, table, or list.

  NSPointerArray is modeled after NSMutableArray, but it can also hold NULL values (which contribute to the object’s count). You can also set the count of the pointer array directly (something you can’t do in a traditional array).

• NSDictionary and its mutable subclass NSMutableDictionary use key-value pairs.

  In other environments, a dictionary may be referred to as a hash table or hash map.

  NSMapTable is modeled after NSMutableDictionary but provides different options, in particular to support weak relationships in a garbage-collected environment.

• NSSet and its mutable subclass NSMutableSet provide unordered storage of objects.

  Cocoa also provides NSCountedSet, which is a subclass of NSMutableSet and which keeps a count of how many times each object has been added to the set.

  NSHashTable is modeled after NSMutableSet but provides different options, mostly to support weak relationships in a garbage-collected environment.