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What does natural order mean in this context in java?

I have a question that came up in a last article (I am revisiting for my exams) and I stumbled upon this natural order word, which appears to be a keyword as it was bold on paper. I looked online at Natural Order, but I couldn't find anything linking it to an arraylist as my question asks.

Please note: I don't need help with the actual question, I just want to understand what natural order means.

Question:

Write a static Java method called atLeast that takes an ArrayList of objects that are in natural order, an ArrayList item type object, and an integer n. the method call must return true if at least n elements of the ArrayList are greater than the element type object according to natural ordering, otherwise it must return false.

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3 answers


This probably means that the objects in the list implement Comparable

:

This interface imposes complete ordering on the objects of each class that implements it. This ordering is called the natural ordering of the class, and the method of the class compareTo

is called its natural comparison method.



Your ad will look something like this:

static <T extends Comparable<? super T>>
boolean atLeast(List<T> list, T key, int n) {
    ...
}
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You can look here for details.
For objects that have natural ordering, they must implement the interface. java.lang.Comparable.

In other words, objects must be comparable to determine their order. This is what the Comparable interface looks like:



public interface Comparable<T> {
  int compareTo(T o);
}
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Natural order means the default order for a particular type of collection. It depends on the type of collection you are using. eg. if its a string set, it will be sorted alphabetically, and for numbers, the ordinal.

Refer here for a better understanding of natural order.

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