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CS156

Student: ex17

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Part of a series of tutorial articles about a Student class.

Code examples referred to on this page can be found here: https://github.com/ucsb-cs156/student-tutorial/tree/ex17.

NOTE: NOT YET UPDATED FOR JAVA 17 and JUNIT 5 (TODO for W22, 01/05/22)

In this exercise, we build on ex15, where we showed writing a java.util.Compartor<Student> that allows us to sort by name.

The Comparator in ex15 was implemented as a separate named class. However, since Java 8, it is much easier to write Comparators as lambda expressions.

However, that’s only true if you understand what a lambda expression in Java represents.

A lambda expression is:

  • a simplified notation
  • for an instance of an anonymous inner class
  • that implements a functional interface

That’s a lot to unpack, so we’ll tackle it a little a time.

First, we tackle inner class. We’ll first implement a Comparator that is a named (non-anonymous) inner class of Student.

Next, we tackle anonymous inner class. The second new Compartor in this exercise will be an anonymous inner class of ReadStudents.

At that point we are ready to see a lambda expression. This is a simplified notation for an instance of an anonymous inner class, and it will be implemented inside ReadStudent.

Finally, we can see that with these concepts in place, we can compose new Comparators from ones that already exist using thenComparing and reversed.