Question

public class RefName { 
  void outRefName() {
    System.out.println("the current reference name is" + xxx);
  };
};

public static void main(String[] args) {
  RefName rf1 = new RefName();
  rf1.outRefName();   // should be rf1
  RefName rf2 = new RefName();
  rf2.outRefName();   // should be rf2
};

As the code above shows,could I make this happen within Java?

thanks.

Answer 1

rf1 is just the name of the variable, so even if you could get this working, it would not be a method of the class – after all, you could have:

RefName rf1 = new RefName();
RefName rf2 = rf1;

this is the same instance; what should rf1.outRefName() produce? No, I don’t think you can do this. In C# there are some hacky ways of doing it (involving captured variables and either reflection or expression-tree inspection), but again – you are getting the variable name – nothing to do with the object. The better approach here may be to give your class a Name member and initialize the name in the constructor:

RefName rf1 = new RefName("myname");

Here, the name of the object is “myname”. Not rf1, which is the name of the variable.