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changed:
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<hr>

<hr><b>2004/09/26 23:17 EST (via web):</b><br>
Two points:

1. When Neal suggested that you declare the array as an 'Object[]' then I think he meant that 'rep' returns an 'Object[]' not a 'T[]', thats my reading of his comments anyway. The reason is that you will be *less* surprised by the 'ClassCastException' particularly since the documentation presumably says that it returns an array of 'Object's and *not* 'T's.

2. The method suggested of using 'java.lang.reflect.Array.newInstance( int )' works OK for an array because all arrays have a one-argument constructor. However in general you can't rely on a type having a no-argument constructor, i.e. 'java.lang.Class.newInstance()' might fail. The general solution is to make an abstract-instance-factory method in 'GenericArray', i.e. 'public abstract T[] instance( int size );', and thus make 'GenericArray' abstract. Then to use 'GenericArray' you must sub-class it and provide a correctly typed instance-factory method, e.g.:
<pre>
abstract class GenericArray&lt; T &gt; {
    private final T[] array;
    public GenericArray( final int size ) {
        array = instance( size );
    }
    public abstract T[] instance( final int size );
    public void set( final int index, final T value ) {
        array[ index ] = value;
    }
    public T get( final int index ) {
        return array[ index ];
    }
    public T[] getArray() {
        return array;
    }
}
public class IntegerArray extends GenericArray&lt; Integer &gt; {
    public IntegerArray( final int size ) {
        super( size );
    }
    public Integer[] instance( final int size ) {
        return new Integer[ size ];
    }
    public static void main( final String[] notUsed ) {
        final int size = 3;
        final IntegerArray ia = new IntegerArray( size );
        for ( int i = 0; i &lt; size; i++ ) ia.set( i, i );
        for ( int i = 0; i &lt; size; i++ ) System.out.print( ia.get( i ) + " " );
        System.out.println();
        final Integer[] pia = ia.getArray();
        for ( int i = 0; i &lt; size; i++ ) System.out.print( pia[ i ] + " " );
        System.out.println();
    }
}
</pre>

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