Object Methods for Nodes

You might have wondered why printList and printBackward are class methods. I have made the claim that anything that can be done with class methods can also be done with object methods; it's just a question of which form is cleaner.

In this case there is a legitimate reason to choose class methods. It is legal to send null as an argument to a class method, but it is not legal to invoke an object method on a null object.

This limitation makes it awkward to write list-manipulating code in a clean, object-oriented style. A little later we will see a way to get around this, though.