Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Section 20.4 Additional Compile-Time Translation Issues: Methods That Use a Type Parameter as the Return Type

• When a generic method is compiled, the compiler performs erasure (p. 848) to remove the type-parameter section and replace the type parameters with actual types. By default each type parameter is replaced with its upper bound (p. 848), which is Object unless specified otherwise.

• When erasure is performed on a method that returns a type variable (p. 848), explicit casts are inserted in front of each method call to ensure that the returned value has the type expected by the caller.