Self Referenced Class in Java

Question

I understand that in c self-referential structures are allowed but the self-included ones are not. Borrowing the example here:

Invalid:

struct a
{
    int someVar;
    a bad;
};

Valid:

struct a
{
    int someVar;
    a* good;
};

But in Java the following class is valid:

class Node {
    int val;
    Node next;
}

This looks more like the invalid example in c. My question is: why is this legal in Java?

I have a feeling that this is related to the fact that in Java you only have access to references (like pointers), not the actual objects, but I still don't fully understand this. And searching for "self-referential in Java" does not give a lot of related information. Can anyone give some hints? Thanks!

Answer 1

Java hides some implementation details from you that C does not.

In Java, any instance of a class is a reference i.e. a pointer to an object without explicitly using a pointer.

In C there are no references, only values. So you need to explicitly use a pointer value to hold the address of an object to essentially have a reference to it.