Chapter 23. Generic Class Libraries

Consider the following common programming situation. You write an analysis method where part of the analysis is generic and part is specific to a given problem. As a good Java programmer, you don't want a different version of the method for every problem it might be used to solve. What you want is to write one generic version of the method that accepts the problem-specific information as an argument.

In C the answer would be to use a function pointer. As the name implies, it is a pointer to a generic function with a certain input parameter list. Java doesn't have function pointers, but you can do the same thing by using classes. A class can be defined to contain problem-specific information. An instance of the ...

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