Help,about why we use inner class?

Question

Hi,
when i read "java Tutorial"
i found there is one chapter about inner class .
i copy it down as follow.
the context is about there is a class Stack, and this class want to implement some function of interface Iterator,but as the book said
we should not let class Stack implement the Iterator directly, we should add a inner class inside the Stack .
i know it's very import ,but i still can not understand the reason why add a inner class here.
hope somebody can explain it a little more for me or give an example.
thank in advance!
Iterator defines the interface for stepping once through the elements within an ordered set in order. You use it like this:
while (hasNext()) {
next();
The Stack class itself should not implement the Iterator interface, because of certain limitations imposed by the API of the Iterator interface: two separate objects could not enumerate the items in the Stack concurrently, because there's no way of knowing who's calling the next method; the enumeration could not be restarted, because the Iterator interface doesn't have methods to support that; and the enumeration could be invoked only once, because the Iterator interface doesn't have methods for going back to the beginning. Instead, a helper class should do the work for Stack.
The helper class must have access to the Stack's elements and also must be able to access them directly because the Stack's public interface supports only LIFO access. This is where inner classes come in.
Here's a Stack implementation that defines a helper class, called StackIterator, for enumerating the stack's elements:
public class Stack {
private Object[] items;
//code for Stack's methods and constructors
not shown
public Iterator iterator() {
return new StackIterator();
class StackIterator implements Iterator {
int currentItem = items.size() - 1;
public boolean hasNext() {
public Object next() {
public void remove() {
or you can visit here
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/javaOO/innerclasses.html

Answer 1

the context is about there is a class Stack, and this
class want to implement some function of interface
Iterator,but as the book said
we should not let class Stack implement the Iterator
directly, we should add a inner class inside the
Stack .Simply because the implementation of the Iterator is nobody's business. By declaring it to be a private inner clss, nobody will ever know about it and only see the Iterator interface.