Suggestion to use List instead of Type array

[Fuxiang Chen <fc...@cse.ust.hk>]

Dear Developers,

We are a team of researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology (HKUST). Currently, we are studying how crowdsourcing can help
developers to build a higher quality software.

One of the subjects that we used is Lucene. From our experiment, we
identified an area in a particular file "PhraseQuery.java" that can be
converted to a List<Type>. Using List<Type> is more preferred as it is much
more flexible and easier to maintain.

The following identified method is able to convert to a List<Type>:
1) public int[] getPositions()
The above method used a primitive int array, and can be converted to a
List<Integer> instead.

Our references from the Stack Overflow community pointed out that
List<Type> is preferred over a Type array.
The Stack Overflow references to this are at "
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8689246" and "
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/716597".

By converting the Type array to a List<Type>, this will make the code more
flexible and easier to maintain.

We hope that you can consider this and let us know about any thoughts. This
will be a tremendous help to us in our continuing research to building a
better software and to help the open-source community as a whole.

Please do not hesitate to contact me @ fchenaa@cse.ust.hk if there are any
queries.

Thanks a lot and have a great week ahead!


-- 
Warmest Regards,
    Fuxiang