Just some help understanding literals

Question

I read the tutorials, and I still don't really get what literals actually are ?
And also, what is the significance of '.class' ? Because I also couldn't understand this :
Finally, there's also a special kind of literal called a class literal, formed by taking a type name and appending ".class"; for example, String.class. This refers to the object (of type Class) that represents the type itself.

Answer 1

JoachimSauer wrote:
_ELBEE_ wrote:
So the +.class+ suffix can be added to any class name to inspect that class.
Basically yes. A different way to get the Class object for a given class is to call Class.forName() with the class name as a String (literal) as the parameter.Or call getClass() on a particular instance. It all depends on the exact scenario in which you're trying to get a class object
int i1 = 42;
int i2 = Integer.parseInt("42");
Integer i3  = Integer.valueOf(i1);
Class c1 = java.lang.Integer.class; // I knew the classname when I wrote the code
Class c2 = Class.forName("java.lang.Integer"); // I didn't know the classname when I wrote the code
Class c3 = i3.getClass();  // I have an instance, and I want it's class objectIn this code i1 and c1 are intialized using literals of their respective types, and i2 and c2 are initialized by calling method that return values of their respective types.