Question

Let’s say I have a class designed to be instantiated. I have several private ‘helper’ methods inside the class that do not require access to any of the class members, and operate solely on their arguments, returning a result.

public class Example {    private Something member;     public double compute() {        double total = 0;        total += computeOne(member);        total += computeMore(member);        return total;             }     private double computeOne(Something arg) { ... }    private double computeMore(Something arg) {... }  }  

Is there any particular reason to specify computeOne and computeMore as static methods – or any particular reason not to?

It is certainly easiest to leave them as non-static, even though they could certainly be static without causing any problems.

Answer 1

I prefer such helper methods to be private static; which will make it clear to the reader that they will not modify the state of the object. My IDE will also show calls to static methods in italics, so I will know the method is static without looking the signature.