flyweight pattern, Java

[juan_gandhi]

The problem is this. We have interface Entity {...}; and we have, say, class EntityCollection {...}. An entity has several attributes, but we store the attributes somewhere in a differnt way in

EntityCollection

, e.g.

String[] firstNames

and

String[] lastNames

, something like that.

Now, there seems to be no way to have a method like getEntity(int i) without actually instantiating something or actually having an instance. Looks like a subtle defect to me: eventually all we need to do is use some methods from the virtual instance of Entity, and, generally speaking, we would not need any memory for that. I mean, in c with macros we could do this dirty trick, but with Java... everything seems to be so materialistic...