Defaults for Objects' methods

[Brenden Towey]

On 7/19/2012 7:14 AM, Deepak S Patwardhan wrote:
> 1. Make the output pretty. Add special handling for Objects' methods at
> runtime. (to put it in very brief words)


I don't understand why this is a big deal.  Can you be less brief about 
what is going on here?

It seems that if you don't find a method signature in a class hierarchy, 
you look in the interfaces implemented by the class hierarchy.  Then at 
the end of that search, you look at Object. I've done this myself when 
inspecting objects reflectively.  In some situations, it's useful to 
ignore Object's methods, say when you consider a class a Java Bean but 
you don't want to include "getClass()" as a getter.  So you check 
methods up to Object, but you don't include Object.

Why is it harder for the runtime to do this?