Basic Java utility classes to be shared across EPICS projects until suitable replacements are available in the JDK.

This package provides a class hierarchy to handle collections of primitives. The goals of the API are:

• Allow access to the numeric data of a primitive array regardless of the type stored in the array
• Allow unmodifiable views of the data, to increase encapsulation or to simplify multi-threading (by using effectively immutable types)
• Allow basic array manipulation operation such as: splitting, copying, printing, comparison and so on.
• Take care of type conversions, including unsigned primitives, which are in general not well supported in Java
• With some reasonable restriction, there should be no performance cost when accessing a primitive array through the collection classes
• With some reasonable restrictions, allow to access the internal primitive arrays for interoperability with other libraries

The library is designed to mimic as much as possible the standard Java collection classes. We do this for two reason:

• to make the library more intuitive for a general Java programmer
• there has been talk about generic reification / value classes, which may make the collection classes directly usable to access primitives with no penalties

The package is structured as follows:

• CollectionNumber - provides the top level class of the hierarchy
• CollectionXxx - provides the top level class of the hierarchy