Skip to main content

And the solution...

Well, this one wasn't the toughest by any stretch. But it does highlight some weird syntax that's possible (though highly frowned upon.)

Rather than putting the square brackets that signal the return type is an array straight after the return type, these can also go after the method declaration. So it's exactly the same as:


public class Test{
public byte[][][] functionArray() {
return null;
}
}


So yes, it compiles and runs fine.

It's a bit of a weird design choice this one - these days it's just there for backwards compatibility, and even the JLS goes so far as to say it shouldn't be used in new code. So stay away from writing it, but if you see some weird old code like this then don't be too shocked :-)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The comprehensive (and free) DVD / Blu-ray ripping Guide!

Note: If you've read this guide already (or when you've read it) then going through all of it each time you want to rip something can be a bit of a pain, especially when you just need your memory jogging on one particular section. Because of that, I've put together a quick "cheat sheet" here  which acts as a handy reference just to jog your memory on each key step. I've seen a few guides around on ripping DVDs, but fewer for Blu-rays, and many miss what I believe are important steps (such as ensuring the correct foreign language subtitles are preserved!) While ripping your entire DVD collection would have seemed insane due to storage requirements even a few years ago, these days it can make perfect sense. This guide doesn't show you a one click approach that does all the work for you, it's much more of a manual process. But the benefits of putting a bit more effort in really do pay off - you get to use entirely free tools with no demo versions, it...

Draggable and detachable tabs in JavaFX 2

JavaFX currently doesn't have the built in ability to change the order of tabs by dragging them, neither does it have the ability to detach tabs into separate windows (like a lot of browsers do these days.) There is a general issue for improving TabPanes filed here , so if you'd like to see this sort of behaviour added in the main JavaFX libraries then go ahead and cast your vote, it would be a very welcome addition! However, as nice as this would be in the future, it's not here at the moment and it looks highly unlikely it'll be here for Java 8 either. I've seen a few brief attempts at reordering tabs in JavaFX, but very few examples on dragging them and nothing to do with detaching / reattaching them from the pane. Given this, I've decided to create a reusable class that should hopefully be as easy as possible to integrate into existing applciations - it extends from Tab, and for the most part you create it and use it like a normal tab (you can just add it...

Building windows installers in a Linux CI environment using wine and innosetup

Quelea is by far the "side project" that takes up the majority of my time. To aid with testing, I built in CI relatively early with a Jenkins server running on a custom VM. This was great - I could just push a change to the repo from anywhere, and then point the user to the CI release. They'd download it and be able to confirm whether the fix had worked (or not!) I've since switched to Travis and retired said VM (it's one less thing to maintain, and now everything is on Github.) But both these setups had one main issue - the windows installer wouldn't get built as part of this process, since they were Linux boxes and innosetup doesn't have a linux distribution. Travis has added windows support, but it's in early release, and in any case I'd like the entire build process to be able to run on any Linux box - it makes it both quicker and more transferrable if we ever need to move elsewhere. I therefore looked into using wine in the CI release to ...