Question

I know well, what is a class literal in java, I just wonder, what is the reason for the .class in the syntax. Is there any ambiguity removed by this? I mean, wouldn’t an alternative Java syntax using

Class<String> c = String;

instead of

Class<String> c = String.class;

work? To me the class keyword looks like a boilerplate.

Answer 1

Sure, you could make that the syntax. But using the .class suffix makes the compiler’s job easier; it has to do less work to know that the code is syntactically correct.

Without the suffix, the compiler would have to work harder to understand the difference between this:

String.getName() // a method inherited from java.lang.Class<T>

and this:

String.valueOf(...) // a static method from java.lang.String

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If you don’t think that the .class suffix is needed, do you also think that the f and L suffices are useless (for float and long literals, respectively)?