Question

Ok, so this question will probably get closed, but hell, its 4:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep because I’m still frustrated with my Java midterm last night. The test was an on-line thing and you get to see how you did immediately.

The test was poorly written with tons of typos and grammatical errors. I don’t normally care about that, except that when you add in vaguely phrased questions you aren’t sure how to interpret the question anymore, since you can’t assume you can parse it according to the normal rules of English.

One particular question that sticks in my craw:

What is the base type for Collections? (It was written like that, with the capital C, which I think is important.)

The only two relevant possibilities were Object and Collections. Now I know that Collections is the class from which most of the collection classes derive, so I initially selected that. On my second run-through I thought, wait a minute. By base type, does he mean what is the base class from which Collections derives? (After all, by capitalizing the C it indicated Collections class in a specific sense, rather than just collections in a generic sense.) So I changed my answer to Object, because I know that Collections extends Object.

Turns out I was right the first time.

So my question, then: if I kvetch about this question, do I have a leg to stand on? Or am I missing some distinction between base type and base class?

Answer 1

Assuming that the question had a spelling error, and the c should have been lowercase: The base type for most collection classes is the Collection<E> interface.

If the question was spelt properly (capitalized ‘C’ intended and not a typo): The base type of the Collections class is Object.

I’d say the question is poorly phrased anyway.