limitations on using enum as generic parameter

From:
"dalamb@cs.queensu.ca" <david.alex.lamb@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Tue, 8 Feb 2011 09:50:32 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<76e9be77-f846-4559-82ec-1d774a8a6a0b@q36g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>
I am playing around with using enums and generics together in Java 1.5
(yes, I know it's in end-of-life, but it would be a bit of trouble
right now to go to 1.6 let alone 1.7). Having figured out some simple
situations, I tried writing a generic class that takes an enum as a
type parameter. Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to invoke the
enum's values() method -- javac says "Cannot find symbol: method
values()". (the reference to Enum.valueof later also gets errors,
which is why I commented it out to simplify the test).

Is there any way around this, or is there just no way to refer to an
enum's values() method when the enum is a generic parameter?

Here's the code; interface MessageCode should be irrelevant because it
could be any old interface for the purposes of this example:

public class EnumCodeSet<E extends Enum & MessageCode>
                   // implements MessageCodeSet
{
    private E[] enums;
    public EnumCodeSet() {
    enums = E.values();
    }

    public MessageCode get(int index)
    throws IndexOutOfBoundsException
    {
    return enums[index];
    } // get

    public MessageCode valueOf(String name)
    throws IllegalArgumentException, NullPointerException
    {
    // return Enum.valueof(E,name);
    } //
} // end class EnumCodeSet

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