Generic Methods and Type Inferencing in Java

Question

Given the following not-very-useful code:

package com.something;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collectio         


        

Answer 1

I guess you could say it serves as some sort of documentation, so that the user knows that you expect both arguments to be of the same type. Of course, any two objects are of the same type to some degree (they're all Object), so it's a meaningless statement.

Long story short, it's a useless signature.

Of course, if plain returned a type T, that'd be a different story.