What do you think that the following code snippet will print?
Object o = true ? new Integer(1) : new Double(2.0); System.out.println(o);
Yes! It will print:
1.0
What? 1.0? But I have assigned an Integer to my o variable. Why does it print 1.0? It turns out that there is a subtle little specification section in the JLS’s §15.25, which specifies the ternary operator. Here’s what is applied to the above:
The type of a conditional expression is determined as follows:
- […]
- Otherwise, if the second and third operands have types that are convertible (§5.1.8) to numeric types, then there are several cases:
Binary numeric promotion may implicitly perform unboxing conversion! Eek! Who would have expected this? You can get a NullPointerException from auto-unboxing, if one of the operands is null, the following will fail
Integer i = new Integer(1);
if (i.equals(1))
i = null;
Double d = new Double(2.0);
Object o = true ? i : d; // NullPointerException!
System.out.println(o);Obviously (obviously !?) you can circumvent this problem by casting numeric types to non-numeric types, e.g. Object
Object o1 = true ? (Object) new Integer(1) : new Double(2.0); System.out.println(o1);
The above will now print
1
Credits for discovery of this gotcha go to Paul Miner, who has explained this more in detail here on reddit.
in fact the point there is more about the ternary operator that is a bit weird in some cases
http://selectedjavalinks.blogspot.fr/2013/09/if-else-bit-weird-but-let-me-explain.html
notice that the some code especially the last sample might not gives the same result using groovy and using java
Right, nothing to do with unboxing. This will print the same result without any unboxing:
System.out.println(true ? 1 : 2.0);
Recommanding to cast to Object is a bad idea.
So is this in a post-java 1.4 world:
Integer i = new Integer(1);
Should simply be:
Integer i = 1;
It’s not new and for sure Paul Miner didnt discover it :)
Link to Polish java beginner tutorial from 2010…
http://javastart.pl/efektywne-programowanie/javatraps-002/
Yes, claiming that it was new to everyone was a bit premature. This particular case is probably as old as unboxing itself. For example, it made it into the NASA coding standards as R40:
http://lars-lab.jpl.nasa.gov/JPL_Coding_Standard_Java.pdf