How does "final int i" work inside of a Java for loop?

Question

I was surprised to see that the following Java code snippet compiled and ran:

for(final int i : listOfNumbers) {      System.out.println(i); } 

where listOfNumbers is an array of integers.

I thought final declarations got assigned only once. Is the compiler creating an Integer object and changing what it references?

Answer 1

Imagine that shorthand looks a lot like this:

for (Iterator<Integer> iter = listOfNumbers.iterator(); iter.hasNext(); ) {     final int i = iter.next();     {         System.out.println(i);     } }