Question

I have a question similar to In Java, why can't I declare a final member (w/o initializing it) in the parent class and set its value in the subclass? How can I work around? but which requires a different solution. As in the above case, I want to declare a variable to be Final in the superclass, but I want the subclass to give it the value. What makes my problem different though is that I don’t want the value passed in to the subclass, I want the subclass to ‘know’ its value, so the above solution doesn’t work for me. Then I tried to do this:

public class Superclass{
    public final int x;
    public Superclass(int x){
        this.x = x;
    }
}
public class Subclass extends Superclass{
    public Subclass(){
        x = 1;
        super(x);
    }
}

…which didn’t work (the call to super() must be on the first line :/ ). But this is basically the behavior that I want. Is there a good way to do this? Thanks!

Answer 1

You could do

super(1);

so instead of setting x, you are passing the value.