[thejake]

The case that I've bumped up against several times is when trying to get the class of the generic object. Something like:

  T obj;
  obj = getObjFromSomewhere();
  log(T.class);

This type of operation is most useful if writing framework type of some sort. I've come across it when trying to write a generic JPA base DAO type of class.

[rit]

Scala has Manifests to emulate reified types for just this reason.

http://www.scala-blogs.org/2008/10/manifests-reified-types.h...

It's improved a bit in 2.8 - in porting some code I discovered a nice little hack that lets you declare your variance like this:

[A <: SomeBaseClass <: Manifest]

Which tells the compiler in an oh so gentle manner to reify for you.