Question

While learning Java’s basics, I remember coming across a particular syntax for passing arguments to a class constructor. I found this syntax extra read-able, but I’m sadly not able to find it anymore. It looked somewhat like the following:

// Creating an instance of the Employee class (has property name, salary, etc)
Employee fred = new Employee({
    name: "Fred",
    salary: 5000
    job: Jobs.PROGRAMMER
});

As you probably can see, it becomes very clear what each argument to the constructor means, which eliminates the need to look at documentation – just to understand simple code.

Am I mixing languages up or does a syntax somewhat like this exists? An eventual link to the manual would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This is not Java syntax (and never was).

What you can do is to achieve something similar is to use Anonymous classes with initializers like this

class Employee{
    String first;
    String last;
}

Employee mike = new Employee(){{
    first = "Mike";
    last  = "Meyers";
}};

There is an explanation of what is going on here: http://blog.schauderhaft.de/2012/08/19/named-parameters-in-java-another-alternative/