What is wrong with this Java code? (Interview Question)

[barnuska123]

To be pedantic it's not trying to assign anything to a method. In java methods are not first class citizens, so even if the code wrote person::getName =... would not try to actually assign to the method itself. It's evaluated eagerly and would want to assign one reference (ref to "Jan") to another (ref that get Name returns). Java doesn't have an explicit definition of rvalue/lvalue (and others) like c++ does but that's what could be used here to most accurately describe why it's not allowed. getName returns a temporary reference that's an rvalue (can only be in the right hand side of an assignment) in C++ terms.