Understanding Squatter in Java – An Essay and Demonstration

Having recently become interested in the innovative use of squatter in Java, I've been hard at work bringing this useful language feature to a variety of my projects. Squatter, or spread-operator, can be used to simplify some of the more mundane tasks associated with the language, allowing for code that is simple and elegant.

For example, let's consider the task of creating an array of some strings that contains a range of numbers from 1 to 4. Rather than individually constructing each element of the array with a call to 'new' and a string, I can instead use squatter to drastically simplify my code. Here is a before and after view of what this could look like:

String array1[] = new String[4];
array1[0] = "1";
array1[1] = "2";
array1[2] = "3";
array1[3] = "4";

String array2[] = {"1","2","3","4"};

As you can see, squatter allows us to quickly and easily create an array with all the desired values.

I find that squatter is also helpful when it comes to constructor functions. For instance, let's say I wanted to create an object with specific attributes but didn't want to manually initialize each parameter of the constructor. I can re-write the constructor call like so:

public class SquatterExample {
    private String str1;
    private int val1; 
 
    public SquatterExample(String str1, int val1){
       this.str1 = str1;
       this.val1 = val1;
    }

public static void main(String[] args) {
		SquatterExample exampleObject1 = new SquatterExample(str1:"one",val1:1); 
		//OR 
		SquatterExample exampleObject2 = new SquatterExample("one",1);
   }
}

Using squatter here drastically simplifies the syntax used to call the constructor, and a few lines of code can be condensed into a single line, as shown here. Moreover, now that squatter is built into the Java language, you are no longer limited in the data structures you can pass to a constructor – which opens up a variety of possibilities.

Overall, leveraging squatter in Java can provide huge benefits when it comes to writing concise and efficient code. After becoming familiar with the new language feature, I have been amazed at what I have been able to do with a fraction of the time and effort I was used to spending when working on software projects. I look forward to continuing to explore the potential uses of squatter and incorporating it into my development process!