posted 11 years ago
You have the usual misunderstanding regarding generic wildcards. When you write "List<? super BigCat>" that means that at runtime, an instance of that type will be an instance of List<X> where X is some supertype of BigCat. It does NOT mean that an instance of that type can contain any object of any supertype of BigCat.
So in your example, an instance of List<? super BigCat> could be a List<Animal>, since Animal is a supertype of BigCat. And you can't add an Object to a List<Animal>. So the compiler rejects that line of code.