Question

I know this isn’t a good question to ask and I might get cursed to ask it but I cannot find any place to get help on this question

Below is a Generic class that appeared in my interview question (which I have already failed). The question was to tell what this Class declaration is doing and in what circumstances this could be used for ?

I have very limited understanding of Generic programming but I understand that ‘T’ is Type and ‘extends’ here means that the Type should have inherited ‘SimpleGenericClass’ but I do not understand the ‘?’ at the end and in what circumstances this Class could be potentially used for

public abstract class SimpleGenericClass<T extends SimpleGenericClass<?>> {

}

Answer 1

First, because the class SimpleGenericClass is abstract, it is meant to be subclassed.

Second, it is a generic class which means that inside the class somewhere you will almost assuredly be using the generic parameter T as the type of a field.

public abstract class SimpleGenericClass<T...> {
    T x;
}

Now the first interesting thing here is that T is bounded. Because it is declared as T extends SimpleGenericClass<?> it can only be SimpleGenericClass<?> or some subclass of SimpleGenericClass<?>. You also asked about thr ?. That’s known as a wildcard and there is a pretty good explanation of it at the Java Tutorial on Wildcards. In your case we would say this is a “SimpleGenericClass of unknown.” It is needed in Java because SimpleGenericClass<Object> is NOT the superclass of SimpleGenericClass<String>, for example.

The second interesting thing though is that since T is a SimpleGenericClass of some sort, your class is more than likely defining recursive structures. What comes to my mind are trees (think of expression trees) where SimpleGenericClass is the (abstract) node type, designed to be subclassed with all kinds of specialized node types.

UPDATE This SO question on self-bounded generics might be helpful to you.

UPDATE 2

I went ahead and put together some code that illustrates how this can be used. The app doesn’t do anything but it does compile and it shows you how the generic bounds can supply some possibly-meaningful constraints.

public abstract class Node<T extends Node<?>> {
    public abstract T[] getChildren();
}

class NumberNode extends Node {
    int data;
    public Node[] getChildren() {return new Node[]{};}
}

class IdentifierNode extends Node {
    int data;
    public Node[] getChildren() {return new Node[]{};}
}

class PlusNode extends Node {
    NumberNode left;
    NumberNode right;
    public NumberNode[] getChildren() {return new NumberNode[]{};}
}

The nice thing here is that NumberNode[] is a valid return type for PlusNode.getChildren! Does that matter in practice? No idea, but it is pretty cool. 🙂

It’s not the greatest example, but the question was rather open ended (“what might such a thing be used for?”). There are other ways to define trees, of course.