Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

Summary

Section 18.1 Introduction

• Generic methods enable programmers to specify, with a single method declaration, a set of related methods.

• Generic classes enable programmers to specify, with a single class declaration, a set of related types.

• Generic methods and classes are among Java’s most powerful capabilities for software reuse with compile-time type safety.

Section 18.2 Motivation for Generic Methods

• Overloaded methods are often used to perform similar operations on different types of data.

• When the compiler encounters a method call, it attempts to locate a method declaration that has the same method name and parameters that match the argument types in the method call.

Section 18.3 Generic Methods: Implementation and Compile-Time Translation ...