Passing a class as an argument

Question

Hi!
Is it possible in Java to pass the reference to a class (not an instance of a class) as an argument to a method? More specifically, I would like a method that can take the reference to a class Y implementing Interface X. The method would then be able to call static and nonstatic methods of Y (including a constructor), which are implementations of methods in X. Is such a thing possible? Or would I do it differently?
My actual case is a scanner, which is supposed to scan a stream and divide it into tokens. It would like to pass different implementations of my interface Token (AToken, BToken, ...) for scanning streams of different kinds. That way I would write the scanner only once and would only have to come up with a new implementation of Token whenever I want to scan a new kind of Stream.
Thanks for help,
Dunk

Answer 1

My actual case is a scanner, which is supposed to scan
a stream and divide it into tokens. It would like to
pass different implementations of my interface Token
(AToken, BToken, ...) for scanning streams of
different kinds. That way I would write the scanner
only once and would only have to come up with a new
implementation of Token whenever I want to scan a new
kind of Stream.There does not seem to be anything in the description of your problem that forces the use of Reflection. You can use an Interface as the argument of a method so the method does not need to know the actual type of the object instance. Similarly, you might use an abstract class.