Free Trial

Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.


  • Create BookmarkCreate Bookmark
  • Create Note or TagCreate Note or Tag
  • DownloadDownload
  • PrintPrint
Share this Page URL
Help

Chapter 6. Enums and Annotations > Item 36: Consistently use the Override annot...

Item 36: Consistently use the Override annotation

When annotations were added to the language in release 1.5, several annotation types were added to the libraries [JLS, 9.6.1]. For the typical programmer, the most important of these is Override. This annotation can be used only on method declarations, and it indicates that the annotated method declaration overrides a declaration in a supertype. If you consistently use this annotation, it will protect you from a large class of nefarious bugs. Consider this program, in which the class Bigram represents a bigram, or ordered pair of letters:

// Can you spot the bug?
public class Bigram {
    private final char first;
    private final char second;
    public Bigram(char first, char second) {
        this.first  = first;
        this.second = second;
    }
    public boolean equals(Bigram b) {
        return b.first == first && b.second == second;
    }
    public int hashCode() {
        return 31 * first + second;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Set<Bigram> s = new HashSet<Bigram>();
        for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
            for (char ch = 'a'; ch <= 'z'; ch++)
                s.add(new Bigram(ch, ch));
        System.out.println(s.size());
    }
}

					  


  

You are currently reading a PREVIEW of this book.

                                                                                        

Get instant access to over
$1 million worth of books and videos.

  

Start a Free Trial