On 8/3/2011 12:42 AM, David Holmes wrote:
Alexandre Boulgakov said the following on 08/03/11 04:44:
On 8/2/2011 2:19 AM, Xuelei Fan wrote:
3017 Vector<Object>  temp = (Vector)extractURLs(res.errorMessage);
    You may not need the conversion any more, the return value of
extractURLs() has been updated to
2564 private static Vector<String> extractURLs(String refString)
The cast is needed to go from Vector<String> to Vector<Object>.

Raw types should be avoided (here and elsewhere there are casts to raw Vector). I'm surprised (generics continue to surprise me) that despite all our advances in type-inference etc that the compiler can not tell that a Vector<T> is-a Vector<Object>. :(

That is because in general a Vector<T> is not a Vector<Object> because of the way subtyping works. As with arrays, it all looks fine until you want to change the container; consider

Vector<String> vs = new Vector<>();
...
Vector<Object> vo = vs; // Assume this was okay to alias an object vector and a string vector

vo.add(new Integer(1));  // Add an Integer to a list of strings, boom!

Using wildcards makes the subtyping work along the type argument axis.

-Joe

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