One of the first features that you generally meet when you learn a new language are arrays. In Dart, you use List objects when you want to define a collection.

Consider the following code: 

void main() {
 String mySongs = sing();
 print (mySongs); 
}

String sing() { 
 var songs = List<String>(); 
 var songString = ''; 
 songs.add('We will Rock You'); 
 songs.add('One'); 
 songs.add('Sultans of Swing'); 
 int i=0; 
 while (i < songs.length) { 
 songString += '${songs[i]} - '; 
 i++; 
 } 
 
 return songString; 
}

In the main() method, we are calling the sing() method and printing its result. The sing() method defines a list of strings:

var songs = List<String>(); 

A list can contain several types of objects. You could have a list of integers, Booleans, or even user-defined objects. You can also avoid specifying the kind of object that is contained in a list by just writing the following:

var songs = List(); 

The <String> after List is the generic syntax. The use of generics enforces a restriction on the type of values that can be contained in the collection, creating a type-safe collection.

Lists implement several methods. You use the add() method to insert a new object into the collection:

songs.add('We will Rock You');

The new object is added to the end of the list. You could reach exactly the same result by writing the following code:

var songs = ['We will Rock You', 'One', 'Sultans of Swing'];

The songs variable would still be a list of strings. If you tried to add a different data type, such as songs.add(24), you would get an error. This is because an integer cannot be inserted into a list of strings, and type safety is enforced by default. 

The while statement contains the condition that needs to be true for the loop to continue:

while (i < songs.length) { 

When the condition (i < songs.length) becomes false, the code in the loop won't execute anymore.

As you've already seen before, the += operator is a concatenation of strings. The $ character allows you to insert expressions into quotes:

songString += '${songs[i]} - ';

Here is the end result of the full code:

As you can see, the three wonderful songs are concatenated, and after each song, you've added a - sign.

Now, let's see a few interesting features that you can leverage while using lists in Dart.