Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Section 20.3 Generic Methods: Implementation and Compile-Time Translation

• If the operations performed by several overloaded methods are identical for each argument type, they can be more compactly and conveniently coded using a generic method. A single generic method declaration can be called with arguments of different data types. Based on the types of the arguments passed to a generic method, the compiler handles each method call appropriately.

• All generic method declarations have a type-parameter section (p. 843) delimited by angle brackets (< and >) that precedes the method’s return type (p. 843).

• A type-parameter section contains one or more type parameters separated by commas.

• A type parameter (p. 843) is an identifier that specifies ...