Generics and Subtyping

Let’s test our understanding of generics. Is the following code snippet legal?

List<String> ls = new ArrayList<String>(); //1
List<Object> lo = ls; //2

Line 1 is certainly legal. The trickier part of the question is line 2. This boils down
to the question: is a List of String a List of Object. Most people’s instinct is to answer:
“sure!”.
Well, take a look at the next few lines:

lo.add(new Object()); // 3
String s = ls.get(0); // 4: attempts to assign an Object to a String!

Here we’ve aliased ls and lo. Accessing ls, a list of String, through the alias lo, we
can insert arbitrary objects into it. As a result ls does not hold just Strings anymore,
and when we try and get something out of it, we get a rude surprise.
The Java compiler will prevent this from happening of course. Line 2 will cause a
compile time error.
In general, if Foo is a subtype (subclass or subinterface) of Bar, and G is some
generic type declaration, it is not the case that G<Foo> is a subtype of G<Bar>.
This is probably the hardest thing you need to learn about generics, because it goes
against our deeply held intuitions.
So we had list of String not subtype of list of Objects.

The problem with that intuition is that it assumes that collections don’t change.
Our instinct takes these things to be immutable.
For example, if the department of motor vehicles supplies a list of drivers to the census
bureau, this seems reasonable. We think that a List<Driver> is a List<Person>,
assuming that Driver is a subtype of Person. In fact, what is being passed is a copy
of the registry of drivers. Otherwise, the census bureau could add new people who are
not drivers into the list, corrupting the DMV’s records.
In order to cope with this sort of situation, it’s useful to consider more flexible
generic types. The rules we’ve seen so far are quite restrictive.