The number of times this list has been structurally modified. Structural modifications are those that change the size of the list, or otherwise perturb it in such a fashion that iterations in progress may yield incorrect results.

This field is used by the iterator and list iterator implementation returned by the iterator and listIterator methods. If the value of this field changes unexpectedly, the iterator (or list iterator) will throw a ConcurrentModificationException in response to the next, remove, previous, set or add operations. This provides fail-fast behavior, rather than non-deterministic behavior in the face of concurrent modification during iteration.

Use of this field by subclasses is optional. If a subclass wishes to provide fail-fast iterators (and list iterators), then it merely has to increment this field in its add(int, E) and remove(int) methods (and any other methods that it overrides that result in structural modifications to the list). A single call to add(int, E) or remove(int) must add no more than one to this field, or the iterators (and list iterators) will throw bogus ConcurrentModificationExceptions. If an implementation does not wish to provide fail-fast iterators, this field may be ignored.