Why no tail() or head() method in List to get last or first element?

Question

I recently had a discussion with a collegue why the List interface in Java doesn\'t have a head() and tail() method.

In order to implement

Answer 1

head() is provided via list.iterator().next(), list.get(0), etc.

It is only reasonable to provide tail() if the list is doubly linked with a tail pointer, or based on an array, etc., Neither of these aspects is specified for the List interface itself. Otherwise it could have O(N) performance.