Question

I mistakenly declared an array of strings as follows:

String[] tokens[];

Eclipse does not highlight this as an error but instead considers it to be equivalent to:

String[][] tokens;

Is this correct behavior or a bug?

Answer 1

It’s correct behaviour – arrays can be defined with brackets after either the object type or variable name.

String[] tokens;

and

String tokens[];

are the same. It is however a confusing way to write a 2D array so I wouldn’t deliberately use it 😉

If you think of arrays as Objects (Which they technically are) and the square brackets as syntactic sugar for the new keyword and an empty contructor you could envisage your “error” as:

tokens = new Array<String>(new Array<String>());

as both

String[] tokens; 

and

String tokens[];

would both be equivalent to

new Array<String>();