Is there a way to apply the Knuth shuffle to a Stack data structure?

Question

For a programming class I am creating a blackjack program for the first homework assignment. The professor has given us a sample Card class, which includes the method to add them to a deck. For her deck, she uses an ArrayList, which you can easily Knuth Shuffle with the Collections.shuffle() method.

That method does not work for Stacks though (obviously), but I think a Stack structure would work best for this program because you may pop and push cards into and out of the deck.

Answer 1

Both java.util.ArrayList<E> and java.util.stack<E> implement the java.util.List<E> interface, and Collections.shuffle() takes a java.util.List<?> as a parameter. You should be able to pass a Stack into Collections.shuffle(), unless you're using a different stack implementation that does not implement java.util.list<E>. If you are, I would advise you to switch to a different stack implementation.