What keeps us from comparing the values of generic types which are known to be icomparable Doesn't it somehow defeat the entire purpose of generic constraints How do i resolve this, or at least work around it? Generic is the opposite of specific Generic and specific refer to the identification of a fact Specific means a fact that has been specified
If you ask for (specify) a pain reliever, aspirin would be a specific pain reliever, while aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen together would be generic pain relievers. What's the best way to call a generic method when the type parameter isn't known at compile time, but instead is obtained dynamically at runtime I have a generics class, foo<t> In a method of foo, i want to get the class instance of type t, but i just can't call t.class What is the preferred way to get around it using t.class? The generic parameter type will be the same for all methods, so i would like it at the class level
What you want to do is (safely) pass the type of the generic type parameter up from the concerete class to the superclass If you allow yourself to think of the class type as metadata on the class, that suggests the java method for encoding metadata in at runtime I think the problem with this is that if you're using this generic method to say, convert a database object from dbnull to int and it returns default (t) where t is an int, it'll return 0 If this number is actually meaningful, then you'd be passing around bad data in cases where that field was null Or a better example would be a datetime. Because under the hood, the compiler will go away and create a new type (sometimes called a closed generic type) for each different usage of the open generic type
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