001/*
002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
003 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
004 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
005 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
006 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
007 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
008 *
009 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
010 *
011 *  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
012 *  distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
013 *  WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
014 *  See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
015 *  limitations under the License.
016 *
017 */
018package org.apache.bcel.generic;
019
020/**
021 * Denotes that an instruction may start the process of loading and resolving
022 * the referenced class in the Virtual Machine.
023 *
024 */
025public interface LoadClass {
026
027    /**
028     * Returns the ObjectType of the referenced class or interface
029     * that may be loaded and resolved.
030     * @return object type that may be loaded or null if a primitive is
031     * referenced
032     */
033    ObjectType getLoadClassType( ConstantPoolGen cpg );
034
035
036    /**
037     * Returns the type associated with this instruction.
038     * LoadClass instances are always typed, but this type
039     * does not always refer to the type of the class or interface
040     * that it possibly forces to load. For example, GETFIELD would
041     * return the type of the field and not the type of the class
042     * where the field is defined.
043     * If no class is forced to be loaded, <B>null</B> is returned.
044     * An example for this is an ANEWARRAY instruction that creates
045     * an int[][].
046     * @see #getLoadClassType(ConstantPoolGen)
047     */
048    Type getType( ConstantPoolGen cpg );
049}