Flexible nature of java.lang.Object

We all love the mechanism of python, where we don’t have to bother about the data types of the variables. Interestingly we have one class in Java too, which is pretty similar! It’s java.lang.Object.

Example:

Java

// Java program to Demonstrate Flexible Nature of
// java.lang.Object

// Importing required classes
import java.util.*;

// Main class
public class GFG {

    // Main driver method
    public static void main(String arr[])
    {

        // Declaring a variable of Object class type
        Object y;

        y = 'A';

        // Getting the class name
        // using getClass() and getname() method
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName());

        y = 1;

        // Getting the class name
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName());

        y = "Hi";

        // Getting the class name
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName());

        y = 1.222;

        // Getting the class name
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName());

        y = false;

        // Getting the class name
        System.out.println(y.getClass().getName());
    }
}

Output

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

Such behavior can be attributed to the fact that the Object class is a superclass to all other classes. Hence, a reference variable of type Object can be practically used to reference 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 review-team@geeksforgeeks.org. See your article appearing on the GeeksforGeeks main page and help other Geeks. Please write comments if you find anything incorrect, or you want to share more information about the topic discussed above.