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Generics are a facility of generic programming that were added to the Java programming language in 2004 within version J2SE 5.0. They were designed to extend Java's type system to allow "a type or method to operate on objects of various types while providing compile-time type safety". [ 1 ]
In the Java programming language, the wildcard? is a special kind of type argument [1] that controls the type safety of the use of generic (parameterized) types. [2] It can be used in variable declarations and instantiations as well as in method definitions, but not in the definition of a generic type.
When primitive and value types are used as generic arguments, they get specialized implementations, allowing for efficient generic collections and methods. As in C++ and Java, nested generic types such as Dictionary<string, List<int>> are valid types, however are advised against for member signatures in code analysis design rules. [29]
Early versions of Java and C# did not include generics, also termed parametric polymorphism. In such a setting, making arrays invariant rules out useful polymorphic programs. For example, consider writing a function to shuffle an array, or a function that tests two arrays for equality using the Object. equals method on the elements. The ...
As a result, often the clone() method can only be used if the actual class of an object is known, which is contrary to the abstraction principle of using the most generic type possible. For example, if one has a List reference in Java, one cannot invoke clone() on that reference because List specifies no public clone() method.
In some systems for object-oriented programming such as the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) [1] and Dylan, a generic function is an entity made up of all methods having the same name. Typically a generic function is an instance of a class that inherits both from function and standard-object. Thus generic functions are both functions (that can ...
Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let programmers write once, run anywhere (), [16] meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. [17]
Java, C#, Visual Basic .NET and Delphi have each introduced "generics" for parametric polymorphism. Some implementations of type polymorphism are superficially similar to parametric polymorphism while also introducing ad hoc aspects. One example is C++ template specialization.