Kaiser S. schreef:
> If it's not possible to put generics in comparators, could you tell me
> what is wrong in the design of the classes? What should i change in
> order to have the same fonctionnalities, but with a different design ?
Please quote some content if you reply to a message. I now had to look
for you previous message in order to try to help.
I pasted it in below.
There is no problem using generics in comparators, but your design is,
indeed, flawed. First of all, the semantics is unclear: why are
HandlerOfB and HandlerOfC extending HandlerOfA?
That is also the source of the problem: HandlerOfA defines
getComparator(), which returns a Comparator. Here already you should
get a compiler warning not to use raw types. But in respect to what
comes later, it is difficult to generify this. What type of Comparator
would you return? Comparator<A> won’t work, since then the methods in
HandlerOfB and HandlerOfC won’t override properly. A possibility is to
make the method itself generic:
public abstract <T extends A> Comparator<T> getComparator();
But that would make it more complicated than it’s worth. From the
snippet you show in the main method, I see no reason why you would need
the handlers inherit from each other. So maybe if you explained what
you really wanted, someone could help you better.
Read also the last link in my sig, particularly the section ‘describe
the goal, not the step’.
> Hello,
>
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> }
> }
H.
- --
Hendrik Maryns
http://tcl.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~hendrik/
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Kaiser S. - 25 Apr 2007 12:02 GMT
> There is no problem using generics in comparators, but your design is,
> indeed, flawed. First of all, the semantics is unclear: why are
> HandlerOfB and HandlerOfC extending HandlerOfA?
Well the snippet is a simplified version of the real source code. The
Handlers have 10/15 methods in common and in a lot of places, i don't
need to know the actual type of handler.
> That is also the source of the problem: HandlerOfA defines
> getComparator(), which returns a Comparator. Here already you should
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>
> But that would make it more complicated than it’s worth. From the
Yes, it's not possible to generify the method.
> snippet you show in the main method, I see no reason why you would need
> the handlers inherit from each other. So maybe if you explained what
> you really wanted, someone could help you better.
>> import java.util.Comparator;
>> import java.util.TreeSet;
[quoted text clipped - 55 lines]
>> }
>> }