On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:02:59 -0400, Lew wrote: > Summercool wrote: >> when a writing or a book reads "a is a Hash object; a is an Array >> object; or a is an Animal object" it is just a short form to say that >> "a is a reference to that object." >> >> b = a means "whatever a is referencing to, now b is referencing it >> too". >> >> so that's why a[1] = "foobar" will change what b will display, but a >> = "foobar" will not change what b will display. > > You can't do both in Java. Is a an array or a String? If a is a String > and b is an array, then neither `a = b' nor `b = a' will compile in > Java. > > Java is a strongly-typed, compiled language which means it does more > static type checking and thus would reject treating a as both an array > and a String. > In that environment the programmer must choose one or the other.
In this Java example, a and b are statically typed to be of type Object. Both Strings and Arrays descend from Object. (And primatives like integers and the like will be autoboxed into descendants of Object). -- Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory. Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology. http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list