References in Objects

In the last chapter we saw that the instance variables of an object can be arrays, and I mentioned that they can be objects, too.

One of the more interesting possibilities is that an object can contain a reference to another object of the same type. There is a common data structure, the list, that takes advantage of this feature.

Lists are made up of nodes, where each node contains a reference to the next node in the list. In addition, each node usually contains a unit of data called the cargo. In our first example, the cargo will be a single integer, but later we will write a generic list that can contain objects of any type.