Flexible nature of java.lang.Object

Difficulty Level : Easy
Last Updated : 13 Apr, 2017

We all love the mechanism of python, where we don’t have to bother about data types of the variables (don’t we!)

Interestingly we have one class in Java too, which is pretty similar !

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Yes, you guessed it right! It’s java.lang.Object

For example,

// A Java program to demonstrate flexible nature of 
// java.lang.Object 
public class GFG 
{ 
    public static void main(String arr[]) 
    { 
        Object y; 
  
        y = 'A'; 
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName()); 
  
        y = 1; 
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName()); 
  
        y = "Hi"; 
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName()); 
  
        y = 1.222; 
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName()); 
  
        y = false; 
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName()); 
    } 
} 

Output:

java.lang.Character
java.lang.Integer
java.lang.String
java.lang.Double
java.lang.Boolean

Such a behaviour can be attributed to the fact that java.lang.Object is super class to all other classes. Hence, a reference variable of type Object can be practically used to refer objects of any class. So, we could also assign y = new InputStreamReader(System.in) in the above code!

This article is contributed by Ashutosh Singh. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article and mail your article to contribute@geeksforgeeks.org. See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks.

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Flexible nature of java.lang.Object