What's the purpuse behind wildcards and how are they different from generics?
- by Nazgulled
Hi,
I never heard about wildcars until a few days ago and after reading my teacher's Java book, I'm still not sure about what's it for and wwhy would I need to use it.
Let's say I have a super class Animal and few sub classes like Dog, Cat, Parrot, etc... Now I need to have a list of animals, my first thought would be something like:
List<Animal> listAnimals
Instead, my colleagues are recommending something like:
List<? extends Animal> listAnimals
Why should I use wildcards instead of simple generics?
Let's say I need to have a get/set method, should I use the former or the later? How are they so different?
