Martin Buchholz wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 02:02, Jeroen Frijters <jer...@sumatra.nl> wrote:
>
>
> Sorry to be late with my comment, but as a VM implementer I can't
> really agree with this modification. The return type of X[].clone() is
> clearly Object, not X{]. That illusion is a javac compiler trick. IMHO
> it belongs in the JLS not in the Object.clone() documentation.
>
>
>
>
> I agree there is a little bit of cheating going on, but I don't agree
> that the return type of X[].clone() is a "javac compiler trick". In
> some sense all compile-time types are javac-created illusions.
Here's what javac generates:
public static void main(java.lang.String[])
Code:
0: aload_0
1: invokevirtual #2; //Method
"[Ljava/lang/String;".clone:()Ljava/lang/Object;
4: checkcast #3; //class "[Ljava/lang/String;"
7: iconst_0
8: ldc #4; //String
10: aastore
11: return
If you read this from the VM perspective (is there any other ;-)), you see that
the VM needs to provide a public clone method on the type String[] that returns
Object.
The previous text made this obvious, with the change, you explicitly need to
understand the (external) fact that the text is talking about javac behavior,
not a feature of the VM (or class library).
I agree that the change makes life easier for the Java developers that use
Javac (i.e. the Java programming language), but since the JVM tries to be a
more hospitable environment to multiple languages, I don't agree in favoring
the Java programming language like this in the API docs.
Regards,
Jeroen
