Update particular elements in a queue/set

Question

Hi, what is the most efficient (in terms of speed, and also memory cost) to update an object in a Queue/Set?
Suppose I have a Word class:
public class Word{
    String word;
    int frequencyInText;
}And I want to keep Word objects in a Queue/Set. Then whenever a new Word is added to the Queue/Set, if it already exists, i want to increase the word's frequency by 1. However Queue/Set do not have a method to retrieve a particular object, in this case, this particular object is the word that already contained by the Queue/Set
I can simply iterate through every element in the Queue/Set, and check if the element equals the duplicate one. if so, modify that object. But this sounds a very heavy process when the Queue/Set is very large, also when the evaluation of equality is complex.
I dont want to use Map to keep <word, frequency> because I want words sorted according to frequency (the "value" field). Also, the collection is updated and queried every now and then. Using Map instead would be more expensive, i suppose.
Is there better ways to do this? thanks very much!

Answer 1

Thanks. My Word class already implements comparable.
Words are comparable on frequency (occurances in a
text), and are equal if the word Strings are equal.Also, ensure you overwrite equals() and hashCode() methods correctly and verify your compareTo() also works as expected.
by calling add(o); so I assume, to update a
particular object, I still have to iterate through
all elements in the TreeSet. And this gives me O(log
n)? Please correct me if im wrong, and thanks veryI think your analysis is correct. Unless you are storing the refs of objects externally too and updating the num occurences through them does not alter the contract for equals()/hashCode(), to update, you will have to first remove(o) and then add(o) in the TreeSet. These are log(N) operation.
Choosing a Hashtable based data structure is advisable for such dictionary operation as it gives you O(1) mostly ... pls re-look at your strategy for using Set.
-BJ