Generic methods returning dynamic object types

Question

Possibly a question which has been asked before, but as usual the second you mention the word generic you get a thousand answers explaining type erasure. I went through that ph

Answer 1

I think you are a static-typed guy, but lemme try: have you thought about using a dynamic language like groovy for that part?

From your description it seems to me like types are more getting in the way than helping anything.

In groovy you can let the Cell.valVal be dynamic typed and get an easy transformation around:

class Cell {
  String val
  def valVal
}

def cell = new Cell(val:"10.0")
cell.valVal = cell.val as BigDecimal
BigDecimal valVal = cell.valVal
assert valVal.class == BigDecimal
assert valVal == 10.0

cell.val = "20"
cell.valVal = cell.val as Integer
Integer valVal2 = cell.valVal
assert valVal2.class == Integer
assert valVal2 == 20

Where as it's everything needed for the most common transformations. You can add yours too.

If needing to transform other blocks of code, note that java's syntax is valid groovy syntax, except for the do { ... } while() block