Does Java have an “is kind of class” test method

Question

I have a baseclass, Statement, which several other classes inherit from, named IfStatement, WhereStatement, etc... What is the best way t

Answer 1

This is not the way to do things in an object-oriented way, it's a throwback to the old code/data dichotomy. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing (if you know what you're doing) but it should be left to the non-object-oriented languages like C.

With proper design, you don't need that sort of behavior. Instead of the construct:

if (obj.getClass().isInstance(Statement.class)) {
    doStuffWithStatements((Statement) obj));
}

(apologies to benjismith for 'stealing' his code), you should really be making the object itself responsible for its own activities thus:

obj.doStuff();

Then each different obj class will have its own definition for doStuff. That is the right way to do it.