Methods with Variable Number of Arguments

     In my last article, I discussed how before the introduction of VarArgs, programmers had to deal with the requirement of methods. Here, I am going to discuss the VarArgs Methods, that allow you to deal with the requirement of variable number of arguments in a method. A variable length argument is specified by three periods. For example

static void VarMethod(int...v)

Old School Variable Argument Method

     Before introduction of Varargs(which is going to be our next topic of discussion in Java Journal), two appraoches were used to create methods with variable number of arguments. They are
First approach invloved the use of overloaded method. The method simply involved creating all poosible set of input arguments and define a separate method with same name. This approach gaurantees to push you onto edge.
Second approach was to use a single method with on;y one argument array of the required type. We will discuss this method in here. However, the problems associated with this approach was that each time, preparing for a call to a method, an array was supposed to be created. This method can be extremely complex and errorprone if number of calls are large.

How to return Objects from Methods

      Java enables us to return objects from the methods as well. Returning and passing objects need to consider the  parent child relationship among the classes. This relationship holds importance because, as a matter of fact, Object of parent class can hold the address of object of child class.

How to use Objects as Parameter

     The first thing that anyone needs to know is the difference between argument and parameters. Arguments are the variables that are passed to the functions and parameters are the variables that receive the value of the arguments. Java rich Object Oriented Features allow us to use Objects as the parameter.