How Can Generics Eliminate Type Casting in Animal Friend Retrieval?

How to Eliminate Type Casting in Generic Method Return Types

Consider a classic OOP scenario: an Animal class with various subclasses like Dog, Duck, and Mouse, each with unique behaviors. Each animal can have a collection of friends, allowing them to interact with each other.

However, retrieving a friend's specific behavior requires typecasting, as seen in this code snippet:

To eliminate this typecasting, generics can be used to make the return type of the callFriend method flexible.

While this approach conveys the return type to the method as an unused parameter, a more elegant solution is to determine the return type at runtime.

One way to achieve this is by modifying the callFriend method:

This allows you to call the method as follows:

This method provides the benefit of no compiler warnings, but it's essentially an updated version of pre-generic casting and doesn't enhance safety.

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