generics question, type mismatch

[Denis Wen]

His,

I am having this error "Type mismatch: cannot convert from Class<capture#3-of ? extends Object> to Class<V>". Everything looks fine to me, shouldn't value.getClass() return variable of type Class<V>?

public abstract class NotifyCache<K,V> implements Cache<K,V> {
protected void notifyPut(K key, V value) {
Class<V> clazz = value.getClass(); //error here
//doing stuff....
}
}

thanks

[Henry Wong]

Everything looks fine to me, shouldn't value.getClass() return variable of type Class<V>?

Yeah. You would think that it would be the case? But it's not.

The getClass() method is from the Object class. And the Object class is not a generic class. So, the getClass() method returns a Class object of an unknown type (? that extends Object, to be exact).

IMO, I think they purposely didn't make the Object support generics, and the reason is because it would be too annoying to fix everything -- since everything inherits from the Object class.

Henry

[Rob Spoor]

You know that value is an instance of V, but you can't know the exact class.

If V is a class, value can be of a sub class of V. For instance, if V is Number, then value.getClass() will return Integer.class (which is a Class<Integer> object) if value is actually an Integer object.

If V is an interface however, value can be of any class as long as it implements V. This is why value.getClass() does not even return a Class<? extends V>.