What are the original reasons for ToString() in Java and .NET?

Question

I\'ve used ToString() modestly in the past and I\'ve found it very useful in many circumstances. However, my usage of this method would hardly justify to put th

Answer 1

It was initially added to Object for debugging and logging purposes. You can deduce this if you look at the JavaDoc for Object.toString (http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Object.html#toString()), as it outputs the classname, followed by @, followed by the unsigned hexadecimal representation of the hash code of the object. The only place I can see this being very useful is in a log or console.

But the Java creators intentionally left this method non-final so subclasses could (and should) override it to instead output more subclass-specific information. They could have just implemented the JVM such that passing an object into any method that required a string, it would generate that hash value above and pass it into the method, but instead they were nice and implemented it as a method that you could so conveniently override.

And its implemented at the Object level so they you can safely assume any object can be written out to a log/console. Its a convenient assumption in the Java language.