Typed Collection

When people are starting to work with objects, particularly in a strongly typed language, a common question is whether they should have specific collection classes for different domain types. So if you have a company class which stores a collection of employees, should you use a regular collection class from your libraries, or should you create a specific EmployeeList class - a typed collection.

(Of course if you have generics, then you would just use a parameterized class here - but I'll assume you are using something like Java or C# which don't yet have this feature.)

The main argument in favor of using a typed collection is that it promotes type-safety. You can ensure that only employees are added to the class, and you can also ensure that any elements you get from the collection are properly typed - thus avoiding a smelly downcast.

On the whole, however, it isn't worth the trouble. If you're using a collection you should be making it an EncapsulatedCollection, so that protects the type safety on updates. Handling the downcasting on access is a nice idea, but involves a lot of boilerplate code. You can reduce the pain of this with code generation - but my take is that it's more trouble than it's worth.