Container (data structure)

In computer science, a container is a class, a data structure, or an abstract data type (ADT) whose instances are collections of other objects. In other words, they store objects in an organized way that follows specific access rules. The size of the container depends on the number of objects (elements) it contains. Underlying (inherited) implementations of various container types may vary in size and complexity, and provide flexibility in choosing the right implementation for any given scenario.

Containers can be characterized by the following three properties:

Container classes are expected to implement methods to do the following:

Containers are sometimes implemented in conjunction with iterators.

Containers can be divided into two groups.

Each object is stored independently in the container and it is accessed directly or with an iterator.

An associative array, map, or dictionary is a container composed of (key,value) pairs, such that each key appears at most once in the container. The key is used to find the value, the object, if it is stored in the container.

Widget toolkits use special widgets also called Containers to group the other widgets together (windows, panels, ...). Apart from their graphical properties, they have the same type of behavior as container classes, as they keep a list of their child widgets, and allow to add, remove, or retrieve widgets amongst their children.

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