About clone method usage?

[Anto Telvin]

Hi all
When we need a copy of array and two references we can use the clone().
eg: int[] a={1,2,3,4,5}
int[] ca=(int[])a.clone();
here why i need to type cast it ? if i am removing that type cast also it is working

thanks

[Joanne Neal]

Originally posted by Anto telvin Mathew:
here why i need to type cast it ? if i am removing that type cast also it is working

thanks

If it works without the type cast then you don't have to type cast it, but it doesn't matter if you do.

[Rob Spoor]

In Java 1.4 and earlier, all clone() could return was Object. Therefore, you always needed to cast the result to whatever it really is returning.

Java 5.0 introduced covariant return types. It basically means that if you override (or implement) a method that is defined to return X, you can now declare to return anything that IS-A X.

clone() is one such example; although at just a very few places so far, it has been changed for arrays to return the array type. I'm still a bit annoyed at Sun for not changing it all over the place. It can't be to break existing code - generics and collections have the same risk. I just call it plain laziness. Why was it so hard to make java.util.Date for instance return Date for clone() instead of Object?