Pointer to a Method

Greetings:

One of the neat time saving code tricks I used to do in C was to store the address of a function in a pointer for later use. It was slick to be able to decide which function needed to be used somewhere else and then have a block that simply dereferenced the pointer and called the correct function.

During my short stint in the world I Java I have already seen a couple occasions where that functionality would be nice to have. Can one do this kind of thing in Java? I have experimented with this but to no avail. Just wondering if any of the experts here know of a way.

Thanks...

That feature is not available as such. However, there's the java.lang.reflect.Method object, but you shouldn't use reflection unless you have no choice. A better way is to use an interface. The Command Pattern is a reasonable approximation to what you're talking about, at least for some use cases.

Thanks for the reply. I will look into Pattern as you suggest.