Downcasting in Java

Question

Upcasting is allowed in Java, however downcasting gives a compile error.

The compile error can be removed by adding a cast but would anyway break at the runtime.

Answer 1

Downcasting is very useful in the following code snippet I use this all the time. Thus proving that downcasting is useful.

private static String printAll(LinkedList c)
{
    Object arr[]=c.toArray();
    String list_string="";
    for(int i=0;i

I store String in the Linked List. When I retrieve the elements of Linked List, Objects are returned. To access the elements as Strings(or any other Class Objects), downcasting helps me.

Java allows us to compile downcast code trusting us that we are doing the wrong thing. Still if humans make a mistake, it is caught at runtime.