Weird “[]” after Java method signature

Question

I looked at some Java code today, and I found some weird syntax:

public class Sample {
  public int get()[] {
    return new int[]{1, 2, 3};
  }
}
         


        

Answer 1

As there is a C tag, I'll point out that a similar (but not identical) notation is possible in C and C++:

Here the function f returns a pointer to an array of 10 ints.

int tab[10];

int (*f())[10]
{
    return &tab;
}

Java simply doesn't need the star and parenthesis.