Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Returns a clone of this object. A
clone
is a new object that is
a copy of the object on which
clone
is invoked. Cloning is dis-
cussed in the next section.
public final Class<?>
getClass()
Returns the
type token
that represents the class of this ob-
ject. For each class
T
there is a type token
Class<T>
(read as
"class of T") that is an instance of the generic class
Class
de-
scribed in "
The Class Class
" on page
399
.
When invoked on
an instance of
Object
this method will return an instance of
Class<Object>
; when invoked on an instance of
Attr
it will re-
turn an instance of
Class<Attr>
, and so forth.
protected void
finalize()
throws Throwable
Finalizes the object during garbage collection. This method is
discussed in detail in "
Finalization
"
on page
449
.
public String
toString()
Returns a string representation of the object. The
toString
method is implicitly invoked whenever an object reference is
used within a string concatenation expression as an operand
of the
+
operator. The
Object
version of
toString
constructs a
string containing the class name of the object, an
@
charac-
ter, and a hexadecimal representation of the instance's hash
code.
Both the
hashCode
and
equals
methods should be overridden if you want
to provide a notion of equality different from the default implementation
provided in the
Object
class. The default is that any two different objects
are not
equal
and their hash codes are usually distinct.
If your class has a notion of equality in which two different objects can
be
equal
, those two objects must return the same value from
hashCode
.
The mechanism used by hashed collections relies on
equals
returning
