Can I overload variables in Java?

Question

I'm writing a class to represent a matrix. I want it to look something like this:

public class matrix {
    private int[][] matrix;
    private double[][] matrix;
    //And so on and so forth so that the user can enter any primitive type and
    //get a matrix of it
}

Is this legal code, or would I have to have different variable names based on the data types that their matrix holds?

Answer 1

You can't overload variables. With your approach, you should give them different name, then overload the getMatrix method for different types.

A better approach is to use Java Generics:

public class Matrix<T> {
    private T[][] matrix;
    public T getMatrix() {return matrix;}
    ...
}

and then create objects of whatever types you want: Matrix<Integer>, Matrix<Double>, etc.