In java int, float and etc., are primitive types. Wrapper classes are used in case we need to use it with generics. But still the following declaration works in java,
Class<Integer> intClass=int.class
How can we call int.class even though it is a primitive type?
A primitive becoming an Object
For primitives, there are Class objects available as constants named TYPE in the corresponding wrapper classes -- i.e. int.class is changed to java.lang.Integer.TYPE . For other types, the compiler creates a private member variable in the class being compiled to hold the Class object, and generates code to initialize that member using Class.forName() .
Found some discussion
And a nice discussion here and your example also covered in this link.
A few words from there :
how can a Class be a primitive? Let's confuse things a bit more. We can access the Class object representing a defined class by coding, say:
Equation.class // returns the Equation Class object
But, we can also say:
int.class
obtain a Class object whose name is "int". Note we have not sent the getClass() method to an object; we have used the reserved word for a built-in primitive type (int) and, using dot notation, accessed its class "field." And this returns a Class object!