IO.println behavior on char[]

[David Alayachew]

Ah, I see you were referring to System.out.

Adding that overload makes sense. Though, I would rather it default to
doing Arrays.toString, as opposed to just the one overload. That way, all
arrays would be printable.

That was a common pain point for my students. Try to print an array of
objects, and they only get an array address. And since they don't recognize
that it's an address, it created some confusing bugs, as they think the
hexadecimal address string was from previous or following print statements.

On Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 12:36 PM David Alayachew <davidalayachew at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Is there a char[] overload? I just checked the javadoc for 24 and 25, and
> I only see Object, String, and no-arg overloads. Not char[].
>
> On Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 6:40 AM Ethan McCue <ethan at mccue.dev> wrote:
>
>> I was going through some examples in my writing and noticed that
>>
>> IO.println(new char[] { 'a', 'b' });
>>
>> will hit the Object overload of System.out.println and not the char[]
>> overload
>>
>> This breaks a few of my examples
>> https://javabook.mccue.dev/arrays/aliasing
>>
>
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