instanceof

[reubin haz]

I got a question:

Which of the following statements are true?

1) The instanceof operator can be used to determine if a reference is an instance of a class, but not an interface.
2) The instanceof operator can be used to determine if a reference is an instance of a particular primitive wrapper class
3) The instanceof operator will only determine if a reference is an instance of a class immediately above in the hierarchy but no further up the inheritance chain
4) The instanceof operator can be used to determine if one reference is of the same class as another reference thus

I chose 2 and 4, but the correct answer is 2, in the answer, it says 'The instanceof operator can only be used to make a static comparison with a class type', I'm not quite understand what it means.

Can someone explain what 'The instanceof operator can only be used to make a static comparison with a class type' is ?

Thank you.

[Henry Wong]

4) The instanceof operator can be used to determine if one reference is of the same class as another reference

This is false because... well, how would you do it? Say you want to write a method to determine if two objects are the same class. How would you do it? If you don't know if an object is a String, or StringBuffer, or Thread object, you can't determine what class it is. (With only the instanceof operator that is)

Henry

[Henry Wong]

The instanceof operator can only be used to make a static comparison with a class type

It is awkwardly worded. I believe the "static" is not the type of the variable, it is referring to the type checking, as is not dynamic.

For example, you can do this:

a instanceof String
a instanceof Thread

But you can't do this:

a instanceof b.getClass()

Henry
[ June 17, 2005: Message edited by: Henry Wong ]

[Rick O'Shay]

In other words, why not support this:

if (foo instanceof bar) ...

You could not use the class type on the right since it must work with interfaces. You could assume the declared type of bar. Now you've tied conditional logic to a variable type name that may quietly break in many different ways at runtime. Looks like "object instanceof type" is perfect.