How to create extensible dynamic array in Java without using pre-made classes?

Posted by AndrejaKo on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by AndrejaKo
Published on 2010-05-26T15:18:46Z Indexed on 2010/05/26 15:21 UTC
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Yeah, it's a homework question, so givemetehkodezplsthx! :)

Anyway, here's what I need to do:
I need to have a class which will have among its attributes array of objects of another class. The proper way to do this in my opinion would be to use something like LinkedList, Vector or similar. Unfortunately, last time I did that, I got fire and brimstone from my professor, because according to his belief I was using advanced stuff without understanding basics.

Now next obvious solution would be to create array with fixed number of elements and add checks to get and set which will see if the array is full. If it is full, they'd create new bigger array, copy older array's data to the new array and return the new array to the caller. If it's mostly empty, they'd create new smaller array and move data from old array to new. To me this looks a bit stupid. For my homework, there probably won't be more that 3 elements in an array, but I'd like to make a scalable solution without manually calculating statistics about how often is array filled, what is the average number of new elements added, then using results of calculation to calculate number of elements in new array and so on.

By the way, there is no need to remove elements from the middle of the array.

Any tips?

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