From the course: Advanced Java Programming

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Introduction to generics in Java

Introduction to generics in Java - Java Tutorial

From the course: Advanced Java Programming

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Introduction to generics in Java

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- [Instructor] Generics are a way to tell a compiler what type of object a collection can contain. Here I have a class called generics example which has two short blocks of code inside the main method. Both blocks do the same thing, they create an array list and add a string to it. Then they get the first element in the list and print it out to the terminal. If I run this program you can see that the output for both is the same. The first example does this without generics. When I assign the string name to the first element in the list, I have to cast it to a string. In the second example, generics are used. When I create the list, I specify in the angled brackets that this is a list of strings. This means that there is no need to cast the object to a string when I assign it to a variable. This might only look like a small change, and the code is actually no shorter. I have just moved the word string but the advantage of using generics means that the compiler checks that only strings…

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