Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

18.3. Generic Methods: Implementation and Compile-Time Translation

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

Figure 18.3 reimplements the application of Fig. 18.1 using a generic printArray method (lines 7–14). Note that the printArray method calls in lines 24, 26 and 28 are identical to those of Fig. 18.1 (lines 44, 46 and 48) and that the outputs of the two applications are identical. ...