Just Java™ 2

Chapter 15. Explanation <Generics>

• Terminology Refresher: Parameters Versus Arguments

• The Problem that Generic Code Addresses

• What Generic Code Looks Like

• Generic Interfaces

• Bounds—Requiring a Type Parameter to Implement an Interface or Extend a Parent Class

• Some Light Relief—On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

The biggest, most far-reaching new feature to come into Java with the JDK 1.5 release is “type genericity”—the ability to pass types as arguments, just the way we can pass values as arguments. In this chapter we'll take a close look at generic types, see what software problem they solve, ...