On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 16:13, Ulf Zibis <[email protected]> wrote:
> ,
>
> the whole enclosing paragraph talks about class, object and instance, so
> why talk about type for the array case?
>
>
Because the array types don't have their own javadoc, there is no other
obvious place to document the compile-time behavior of this method for the
class for e.g. int[].
To be more precise, (but still hand-waving...), it is *as if* every array
type X has an override for clone that looked like this:
class X {
@Override X clone() { return (X) super.clone(); }
}
There is some value putting in the pseudocode above into the spec, but it is
hard to do because it's not actually legal java code, and there is no 1-1
correspondence from array types to classes.
Java does not have "self" types.