private static ?

[Galois271]

If something is declared private, then why would it also be declared
static? I saw this being used in an inner class.

Thanks!
Lurch

 

[Mark Space]

If something is declared private, then why would it also be declared
static? I saw this being used in an inner class.

"static" does not mean the same thing as "private" so there's no reason
not to apply both if both are needed.

For an inner class, "static" means there's no connection to the
enclosing class, and the programmer wished to remove the overhead of
maintaining the connection. The programmer may have also been making
explicit the fact that there isn't a connection.

 

[Roedy Green]

If something is declared private, then why would it also be declared
static? I saw this being used in an inner class.

same reason anything else would be declared static, you need only one
of them in the entire JVM, not one per object.

 

[Mike Schilling]

same reason anything else would be declared static, you need only
one
of them in the entire JVM, not one per object.

Though this must be a method (or perhaps a constant), since inner
classes can't have non-constant static fiields.

 

[Lew]

Actually, that's not guaranteed by 'static'. A JVM can have more than one
occurrence of a static field, or to be more precise, a JVM can load more than
one static field from the same bytecode if loaded by different loaders.

Though this must be a method (or perhaps a constant), since inner
classes can't have non-constant static fiields.

Actually, static methods are forbidden to inner classes also:

Inner classes may not declare static members,
unless they are compile-time constant fields (§15.28).

and