Re: Is clone a member function for array types?

From:

Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:00:56 -0800

Message-ID:

<fj28sk$2c4p$1@ihnp4.ucsd.edu>

Daniel Pitts wrote:

tam@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov wrote:

On Dec 3, 12:22 pm, Roedy Green <see_webs...@mindprod.com.invalid>
wrote:

On Mon, 3 Dec 2007 08:02:51 -0800 (PST), t...@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :

Does anyone have any idea what I'm missing?

My guess is arrays are handled as a special case. For example you can
iterate over them with for:each even though they don't implement
Iterable.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossaryhttp://mindprod.com

The JLS explicitly mentions that arrays can be iterated over in the
enhanced for loop. Unless there is something I'm missing here [which
is quite likely but I'd like to know what it is], there seems to be a
clear incompatibility between the JLS specification of array members
and Class.getMethods results for arrays. There's nothing I've found
in the documentation that suggests arrays should be handled specially
here.

Regards,
Tom McGlynn

array.length is actually a special JVM instruction, not a field access.

At the Java source language level, according to the JLS, length is a
public final field member of an array type, so it *should* show up in
reflection. However, according to the API documentation for
java.lang.Class, "Every array also belongs to a class that is reflected
as a Class object that is shared by all arrays with the same element
type and number of dimensions."

Patricia