Question

This piece of code will not compile:

    synchronized( obj ) {
        Object a = new Object()
    }

    System.out.println( a.toString() );

Yet I don’t know why.. My understanding was that a synchronized block was always eventually executed, so I would expect code following the synchronized block to be aware of any new declared variables. Where am I wrong?

Answer 1

It’s not the synchronization, it’s the {} symbols. They define a scope, no matter whether there’s an if, for, synchronized, or even nothing at the beginning of them. So the a goes out of scope once the block finishes, because it was declared within it. (Also there’s a missing semicolon at the end of the Object a declaration but I suspect you just forgot to copy that.)