Is `List<Dog>` a subclass of `List<Animal>`? Why aren't Java's generics implicitly polymorphic?

Posted by froadie on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by froadie
Published on 2010-04-30T14:39:39Z Indexed on 2012/12/04 11:09 UTC
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Filed under:

java

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generics

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inheritance

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polymorphism

I'm a bit confused about how Java generics handle inheritance / polymorphism.

Assume the following hierarchy -

Animal (Parent)

Dog - Cat (Children)

So suppose I have a method doSomething(List<Animal> animals). By all the rules of inheritance and polymorphism, I would assume that a List<Dog> is a List<Animal> and a List<Cat> is a List<Animal> - and so either one could be passed to this method. Not so. If I want to achieve this behavior, I have to explicitly tell the method to accept a list of any subset of Animal by saying doSomething(List<? extends Animal> animals).

I understand that this is Java's behavior. My question is why? Why is polymorphism generally implicit, but when it comes to generics it must be specified?

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