Forbidden Features

Java has grown to be a complex language with many features. We don’t have time to teach all of these features in CSE 143, so we have a general rule that students should not use advanced material not covered in class. It is not necessarily bad style to use these features, but we want our assessments to emphasize the programming concepts taught in the course.

The following features should not be used in assessments.

• break, continue, return from a void method.
• try, catch, and annotations.
• Java 8 features, such as lambdas, streams, and method references.
• Java 11 features, such as local variable type inference.
• toArray and clone.
• StringBuilder, StringBuffer, StringJoiner, StringTokenizer, and the String methods toCharArray, join, and matches.
• Arrays.asList, Arrays.copyOf, Arrays.copyOfRange, and Arrays.sort.
• Collections.copy, Collections.sort.
• LinkedHashMap.

It’s completely normal if you don’t recognize any of these features since they’re not taught in this course.