In the Bullet Hell game, we declared an arbitrarily sized array of bullets hoping that the player would never spawn too many. We could have used an array so big it would have been impossible to go out of bounds but that is a waste of memory or we could have restricted the number of bullets but that wouldn't have been fun.
With the Snake game, we don't know how many segments there will be, so we need a better solution.
An ArrayList is like a regular Java array on steroids. It overcomes some of the shortfalls of arrays like having to predetermine its size. It adds some useful methods to make its data easy to manage and it uses an enhanced version of a for loop, which is clearer to use than a regular for loop. You can also use ordinary for loops with ArrayList too.
Note
We will learn about enhanced for loops now as it is convenient. We will get to use enhanced for loops in the next project that starts in chapter 18.
ArrayList is part of the wider Java Collections...