Class and Class<?> not the same for overloading purposes

Russel Winder added a comment - 16/Oct/09 12:30 PM - edited The actual issue of the override problem got lost in GRECLIPSE-294 in discussion of the warning pop-ups so I have separated it out rather than reopen.

Andy Clement added a comment - 16/Oct/09 7:39 PM Supertype method is in groovy.lang.DelegatingMetaClass: public Object invokeMethod( Class sender, Object receiver, String methodName, Object [] arguments, boolean isCallToSuper, boolean fromInsideClass) { subtype method that Russel mentions is in gant source file 'org.codehaus.gant.GantMetaClass': @Override public Object invokeMethod ( final Class sender , final Object receiver , final String methodName , final Object [] arguments, final boolean isCallToSuper, final boolean fromInsideClass ) Collapsing this down to the core issue, we have public class TheBase { public Object invokeMethod( Class sender) { return null ; } } class RusselsUberClass extends TheBase { @Override public Object invokeMethod ( final Class <?> sender ) { return null ;} } This gives an error on the override because the method in the supertype is only declared as being type Class<?>. Either removing the <?> in the subtype or adding it to the supertype fixes the bug, but only the latter fix of altering the superclass method to take a Class<?> produces completely clean code. Given that groovy classes (for 1.6.5 and above) appear to be Java5 classes (they are version 49 in the class files) - the fix would be to change the definition of DelegatingMetaClass in groovy.lang. It is annoying that there is an eclipse warning that you can't get rid of just by adjusting your own source, but I suspect it is working as designed. In fact if I try it with javac on the command line (when the subtype is declared to take Class<?>), I get the same thing. N:\>javac TheBase.java TheBase.java:6: method does not override or implement a method from a supertype @Override public Object invokeMethod ( final Class <?> sender ) { return null ;} ^ 1 error