Comments on: Java varargs: inconsistent behaviour if you pass an array

By: Hamdi

Hamdi — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:14:59 +0000

I don’t think that this is an inconsistent behaviour. This is associated with overloading. The rule is “overloaded varagrs methods are always choosen last.”. We can think of the parametrized method Arrays.asList(T…) as the existence (for the first example) of these overloaded methods :
Arrays.asList(String[]) ( or Arrays.asList(String…) for T = String)
Arrays.asList(String[]…) (for T = String[])
This is why, in the first case, Arrays.asList(String[]) is choosen and the return type is the String List.

By: Robin Salih

Robin Salih — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:53:47 +0000

It is a similar story in C#. Consider the following code:
namespace ConsoleApplication1 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { object[] array = { 5, "five" }; Fn(array); Fn(array, 6, "six"); } static void Fn(params object[] p) { foreach (var a in p) Console.WriteLine(a); } } }
The first call passes in the array created in Main, the second call, passes in an array with 3 elements, the array created in Main, followed by 6 and “six”. So a bit inconsistent.