Learning Java, 4th Edition

Wildcards

We mentioned earlier that the kinds of generic type instantiations discussed so far in this chapter have all been concrete type instantiations. We described this as meaning that all of the parameter arguments are real Java types. For example, List<String> and List<Date> are instantiations of the generic List class with the concrete types String and Date. Now we’re going to look at another kind of generic type instantiation: wildcard instantiation.

As we’ll see in this section, wildcards are Java’s way of introducing polymorphism into the type parameter portion of the generic equation. A wildcard instantiation uses a question mark (?) in place of an actual type parameter at instantiation time and denotes that the type can be assigned any of a range of possible instantiations of the generic type. The ? wildcard by itself is called the unbounded wildcard and denotes that any type instantiation is acceptable (assignable to the type).

    List<?> anyInstantiationOfList = new ArrayList<Date>();
    anyInstantiationOfList = new ArrayList<String>(); // another instantiation

In this snippet, we declared a variable anyInstantiationOfList whose type is the unbounded wildcard instantiation of the generic List type. (What a mouthful.) This means that the type we instantiated can be assigned any particular concrete instantiation of the List type, whether Dates, Strings, or Foos. Here, we assigned it a List<Date> first and, subsequently, a List<String>.

A Supertype of All Instantiations

The unbounded ...