How many instances one can have of an anonymous class?

Question

An anonymous class is something like this:

  SenseOfLife _42 = new SenseOfLife() {
    public int eval() {
       return 42;
    }
  };

I didn't understand why such an anonymous class can have an unbounded number of instances (this is a proposition).

While I'm defining this anonymous class it creates automatically an instance and assigns it to the variable _42. So I have only one instance and cannot create a new instance.

Answer 1

You could create multiple instances by:

• Executing the same block of code more than once.
• Cloning an instance of an anonymous class.

Answer 2

If the interface extends Cloneable the class could technically be cloned.

Reflection could get a new instance.

If the same new SenseOfLife() constructor is called in a loop that constructor will get compiled down to one class that is instantiated multiple times.

Answer 3

I haven't tried it, but most likely you can create other instances using reflection, i.e., instance.getClass().newInstance().