8 Polymorphic Abstractions
In the preceding chapters, we have defined a number of collection types in which all elements of the collection are ints. Such collections are rather limiting. For example, suppose we wanted a set that contained Strings. We would not be able to use our implementation of IntSet for this purpose. Instead, we would need to provide a separate implementation for a StringSet. And if we later discovered the need for a set of characters, we would need yet another new implementation.
Having to define a new version of a collection abstraction each time we need to store a different type of element is not very satisfactory. Instead, it would be better to define the collection type just once yet have it work for all types of elements. ...
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