重温 Thinking in Java 4 - Type information

 

import java.util.List;
import java.util.Arrays;

abstract class Shape {
	void draw() {
		System.out.println(this + ".draw()");
	}
	
	abstract public String toString();
	
}

class Circle extends Shape {
	public String toString(){
		return "Circle";
	}
}

class Square extends Shape {
	public String toString(){
		return "Square";
	}
}

class Triangle extends Shape {
	public String toString(){
		return "Triangle";
	}
}

public class Shapes {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		List<Shape> shapeList = Arrays.asList(new Circle(), new Square(), new Triangle());
		for(Shape shape : shapeList){
			shape.draw();
		}
	}
	
}

Output:

Circle.draw()
Square.draw()
Triangle.draw()

 

At the point that you fetch an element out of the array, the container - which is actually holding everything as an Object - automatically casts the result back to a Shape. This is the most basic form of RTTI, because casts are checked at run time for correctness. That's what RTTI means:At run time, the type of an object is identified.

 

In this case, the RTTI cast is only partial:The Object is cast to a Shape, and not all the way to a Circle, Square, or Triangle. That's because the only thing you know at this point is that the List<Shape> is full of Shpes. At compile time, this is enforced by the container and the Java generic system, but at run time the cast ensures it.

 

Now polymorphism takes over and the exact code that's executed for the Shape is determined by whether the reference is for a Circle, Square, or Triangle. And in general, this is how it should be; you want the bulk of you code to know as little as possible about specific types of objects, and to just deal with the general representation of a family of objects (in this case, Shape). As a result, your code will be easier to write, read, and maintian, and your designs will be easier to implement, understand, and change. So polymorphism is a general goal in object-oriented programming.

 

But what if you have a special programming problem that's easiest to solve if you know the exact type of a generic reference? For example, suppose you want to allow your users to highlight all the shapes of any particular type by highlighting them. Or perphaps your method needs to "rotate" a list of shapes, but is makes no sense to rotate a circle so you'd like to ship the circles. With RTTI, you can ask a Shape reference the exact type that it's referring to, and thus select and isolate special cases.