Question

Recently I was reading the following piece of code from oracle collection tutorial when i came across this piece of code.

public static <E> Set<E> removeDups(Collection<E> c) {
             return new LinkedHashSet<E>(c);
}

I was not able to understand why the returned value is something

            <E> Set<E> and not just Set<E> ?

Answer 1

The return type is, in fact, simply Set<E>.

The other <E> is there to indicate that this is a generic method, and to state that E is a parameter to the generic. Without this <E>, the compiler would assume that E is an existing class, and would try to locate it (producing an error if no class named E is in scope).