How can elements be added to a wildcard generic collection?

Question

Why do I get compiler errors with this Java code?

1  public List getFoos()
2  {
3    List foos = new ArrayList

        

Answer 1

To get an idea of how generics works check out this example:

    List sfoo = new ArrayList();
    List foo;
    List tmp;

    tmp = sfoo;
    foo = (List) tmp;

The thing is, that wasn't designed for local/member variables, but for function signatures, that's why it's so ass-backwards.