Names of Class<Throwable[]> objects and Semicolons

[Campbell Ritchie]

I have only just noticed that when I printed out the Throwable[] shown in this post, it didn’t come out as [Ljava.lang.Throwable@abcd1234. It printed [Ljava.lang.Throwable;@abcd1234. I had never noticed the semicolon before. It doesn’t say anything about semicolons in the JLS, nor in Object#toString().
Am I seeing things? Has that semicolon always been there?

[Joanne Neal]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:I have only just noticed that when I printed out the Throwable[] shown in this post, it didn’t come out as [Ljava.lang.Throwable@abcd1234. It printed [Ljava.lang.Throwable;@abcd1234. I had never noticed the semicolon before. It doesn’t say anything about semicolons in the JLS, nor in Object#toString().
Am I seeing things? Has that semicolon always been there?

It does mention it in Object#toString(). The part before the @ is what is returned by class.getName() and the semicolon is part of an array's class name. So you will need to find out where that is documented to find out if it's always been there.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Thank you Joanne
In Class#getName() it does say L[className; if it is an array. I had always seen the L. I had never noticed the ; before. If you go back to the days when it was Class rather than Class<?>, it says the same.