Why can't you have multiple interfaces in a bounded wildcard generic?

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I know there's all sorts of counter-intuitive properties of Java's generic types. Here's one in particular that I don't understand, and which I'm hoping someone can explain to me. When specifying a type parameter for a class or interface, you can bound it so that it must implement multiple interfaces with public class Foo<T extends InterfaceA & InterfaceB>. However, if you're instantiating an actual object, this doesn't work anymore. List<? extends InterfaceA> is fine, but List<? extends InterfaceA & InterfaceB> fails to compile. Consider the following complete snippet:

import java.util.List;

public class Test {

  static interface A {
    public int getSomething();
  }

  static interface B {
    public int getSomethingElse();
  }

  static class AandB implements A, B {
    public int getSomething() { return 1; }
    public int getSomethingElse() { return 2; }
  }

  // Notice the multiple bounds here. This works.
  static class AandBList<T extends A & B> {
    List<T> list;

    public List<T> getList() { return list; }
  }

  public static void main(String [] args) {
    AandBList<AandB> foo = new AandBList<AandB>(); // This works fine!
    foo.getList().add(new AandB());
    List<? extends A> bar = new LinkedList<AandB>(); // This is fine too
    // This last one fails to compile!
    List<? extends A & B> foobar = new LinkedList<AandB>();
  }
}

It seems the semantics of bar should be well-defined -- I can't think of any loss of type-safety by allowing an intersection of two types rather than just one. I'm sure there's an explanation though. Does anyone know what it is?

5 Answers
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