The method body is where all of the action of a method takes place; the method body contains all of the legal Java instructions that implement the method.
Returning a Value from a Method
We declare a method’s return type in its method declaration. Within the body of the method, we use the return operator to return the value. Any method that is not declared void must contain a return statement. The Stack class declares the isEmpty method, which returns a boolean:
public boolean isEmpty()
{
if (items.size() == 0)
return true;
else
return false;
}
The data type of the return value must match the method’s return type; we can’t return an Object type from a method declared to return an integer.
The isEmpty method returns either the boolean value true or false, depending on the outcome of a test.
The isEmpty method returns a primitive type.
Methods also can return a reference type.
For example,
Stack declares the pop method that returns the Object reference type:
public synchronized Object pop()
{
int len = items.size();
Object obj = null;
if (len == 0)
throw new EmptyStackException();
obj = items.elementAt(len – 1);
items.removeElementAt(len – 1);
return obj;
}