“Instantiating” a List in Java? [duplicate]

Answer 1

In Java, List is an interface. That is, it cannot be instantiated directly.

Instead you can use ArrayList which is an implementation of that interface that uses an array as its backing store (hence the name).

Since ArrayList is a kind of List, you can easily upcast it:

List mylist = new ArrayList();

This is in contrast with .NET, where, since version 2.0, List is the default implementation of the IList interface.