1. It's possible to overload put with different data types for value but we will not be able to overload get by varying its return type (because changing return type is not enough for overloading). Even if this was possible, we would only be able to account for types already defined. In other words, IndexedList will not work for programmer-defined types that it does not have an overloaded version of. Assuming we knew all the data types in advance, this still would be an inelegant solution, to say the least, that would contain tens of overloaded methods.

2. To override methods, the signature of the method being overridden in a subclass must be consistent with the overriding one in the parent class. So, we will not be able to e.g. override put in a subclass and have it accept values of type boolean instead of int.

3. This is by far the best idea and one which we used to employ (before Java had Generics -- soon to be explored!). Since every type (class) in Java is a subtype (subclass) of Object, we can leverage type substitution and pass values of any type to the put method and return it from the get method. We will explore the potential issues with this strategy in the next lesson.

Let's answer a question you may have: how can one pass primitive types (int, float, char, ...) to a method expecting Object? The answer is: you cannot do that!! However, every primitive type in Java has a corresponding reference type! For example, int has Integer wrapper class that provides a way to use primitive type int as an object.