Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
The Java Tutorial says that since an inner class is associated with an instance of the enclosing class, it (the inner class) cannot define any static members itself.
It’s interesting for me why can’t inner classes declare static members for instance, some private static field, which the instance of this inner class could possibly share with the other instances of the same inner class? is this just an implementation of things in Java that has to be taken for granted or something else?
Basically just an arbitrary decision. there’s no reason it couldn’t be supported, but there is also not really any good reason to support it. just declare the static field in the outer class.
also, that quote may not be entirely correct: i believe you can declare a static serialVersionUID in an inner class.
Update, sounds like this is now possible as of Java 16.