Lists with wildcards cause Generic voodoo error

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(I assume here that Bar and Baz are both subtypes of Foo.)

List<? extends Foo> means a list of elements of some type, which is a subtype of Foo, but we don’t know which type. Examples of such lists would be a ArrayList<Foo>, a LinkedList<Bar> and a ArrayList<Baz>.

As we don’t know which subtype is the type parameter, we can’t put Foo objects into it, neither Bar or Baz objects. But we still know that the type parameter is a subtype of Foo, so every element already in the list (and which we can get from the list) must be a Foo object, so we can use Foo f = list.get(0); and similar things.

Such a list can only be used for taking elements out of the list, not to adding elements at all (apart from null, but I don’t know if the compiler actually allows this).

A List<Foo> on the other hand allows adding any object which is a Foo object – and as Bar and Baz are subtypes of Foo, all Bar and Baz objects are Foo objects, so they can be added, too.

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