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In class-based programming, downcasting, or type refinement, is the act of casting a base or parent class reference, to a more restricted derived class reference. [1] This is only allowable if the object is already an instance of the derived class, and so this conversion is inherently fallible.
The java.lang.Class [2] class is the basis of more advanced introspection. For instance, if it is desirable to determine the actual class of an object (rather than whether it is a member of a particular class), Object.getClass() and Class.getName() can be used:
Integer are reference objects, on the surface no different from List, Object, and so forth. To convert from an int to an Integer, one had to "manually" instantiate the Integer object. As of J2SE 5.0, the compiler will accept the last line, and automatically transform it so that an Integer object is created to store the value 9. [2]
The class defines the data format or type (including member variables and their types) and available procedures (class methods or member functions) for a given type or class of object. Objects are created by calling a special type of method in the class known as a constructor. Classes may inherit from other classes, so they are arranged in a ...
Duck typing is similar to, but distinct from, structural typing.Structural typing is a static typing system that determines type compatibility and equivalence by a type's structure, whereas duck typing is dynamic and determines type compatibility by only that part of a type's structure that is accessed during runtime.
In object-oriented programming, behavior is sometimes shared between classes which are not related to each other. For example, many unrelated classes may have methods to serialize objects to JSON. Historically, there have been several approaches to solve this without duplicating the code in every class needing the behavior.
For example, in Java, the Comparable interface specifies a method compareTo() which implementing classes must implement. This means that a sorting method, for example, can sort a collection of any objects of types which implement the Comparable interface, without having to know anything about the inner nature of the class (except that two of ...
In Simula, classes are defined in a block in which attributes, methods and class initialization are all defined together; thus all the methods that can be invoked on a class are defined together, and the definition of the class is complete. In Flavors, a mixin is a class from which another class can inherit slot definitions and methods. The ...