i am looking at some java code written by another developer on my project, long since gone. there are a lot of code samples of his along the lines of
Object foo = null;
foo = myManager.getImportantObject();
so i am wondering if this is something he learned from some other language, or if there is some other viable reason why he would do it? it's not a big deal, i assume the java compiler optimizes it out, but WTF?