To implement an unmodifiable collection, the programmer needs only to extend this class and provide implementations for the iterator and size methods. (The iterator returned by the iterator method must implement hasNext and next.)

To implement a modifiable collection, the programmer must additionally override this class's add method (which otherwise throws an UnsupportedOperationException), and the iterator returned by the iterator method must additionally implement its remove method.

The programmer should generally provide a void (no argument) and Collection constructor, as per the recommendation in the Collection interface specification.

The documentation for each non-abstract method in this class describes its implementation in detail. Each of these methods may be overridden if the collection being implemented admits a more efficient implementation.

This class is a member of the Java Collections Framework.