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Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
Primitive wrapper classes are not the same thing as primitive types. Whereas variables, for example, can be declared in Java as data types double, short, int, etc., the primitive wrapper classes create instantiated objects and methods that inherit but hide the primitive data types, not like variables that are assigned the data type values.
For example, an object that uses memoization to cache the results of expensive computations could still be considered an immutable object. Strings and other concrete objects are typically expressed as immutable objects to improve readability and runtime efficiency in object-oriented programming.
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]
In object-oriented programming, "immutable interface" is a pattern for designing an immutable object. [1] The immutable interface pattern involves defining a type which does not provide any methods which mutate state. Objects which are referenced by that type are not seen to have any mutable state, and appear immutable.
Once constructed, these objects are guaranteed not to change anymore. To achieve this, an immutable class must only have final fields, and these final fields may only have immutable types themselves. Java's primitive types are immutable, as are strings and several other classes. If the above construction is violated by having an object in the ...
Objects other than strings can be interned. For example, in Java, when primitive values are boxed into a wrapper object, certain values (any boolean, any byte, any char from 0 to 127, and any short or int between −128 and 127) are interned, and any two boxing conversions of one of these values are guaranteed to result in the same object. [6]
This example uses a String as the state, which is an immutable object in Java. In real-life scenarios the state will almost always be a mutable object, in which case a copy of the state must be made. It must be said that the implementation shown has a drawback: it declares an internal class.