Regarding Inheritance (and super)

Question

Let:
class A { ... }
class B extend A { ... }
From within class B, the super keyword allows me to access the visible methods and variables in A. However, super does not seem to be a reference; that is, while I can legally do
Object a = this;
I cannot do
Object a = super;
But, I would really like to be able to do this. That is, from the context of B, I would like to obtain a reference to the supertype, such that (ref instanceof A == true), (ref instanceof B == false). In short, I want a 'super' that behaves exactly like a 'this'. The ultimate goal of this is to pass a reference to the supertype into a method (say, a static method). Is this at all possible in Java? My only idea at the moment is to create a new instance of the superclass and set all of its state correctly, pass this instance into the desired method, then reestablish state once the method returns. Sounds painful and error-prone, though.
Thanks for any ideas.

Answer 1

sancho_panza wrote:
ejp wrote:
Why? Any method will already accept a reference to B as a reference to A, if B extends A.I am performing a transformation on Java classes that involves turning instance methods into static methods. It is not problem to pass a reference to 'this' into such a static method. But what if the instance method invokes super? Super cannot be invoked statically; thus I would like to pass 'super' into this method, which is impossible. I suppose creating a temporary container for the superclass is the easiest way (though it seems like this should be a lot easier).To do this you need to transform the Java static inheritance to a dynamic equivalent. This is quite straightforward. Say you have,
class A {}
class B extends A {}Now the A class is split into an interface A and an implementation class A_IMPL. You get this,
interface A {}
class A_IMPL implements A {}
class B implements A {
   private A a_ref = new A_IMPL(); // object holding implementation of A
   // The implementation of inherited A methods is delegated to the A_IMPL object
}In the above a_ref is the super reference you desired.