What does .class mean after a class name

Question

What does .class mean in, for example, MyClass.class? I understand that when you put the name of a class and the point it is used to access its sta

Answer 1

You can add .class to the name of any class to retrieve an instance of its Class object.

When you use Integer.class you reference an instance of Class, which is a typed class object.

I always thought this was a field member that got added by the compiler, but it looks like it's really just syntactic sugar.