Introduction to Programming

Static members

A class can be declared static only when it is a nested class. Class members—methods and fields—can be static too, as long as the class is not anonymous or local. Any code can access a static member of a class without creating a class instance (object). We saw such an example in previous sections when we used the class Math in one of the code snippets. A static class member is also called a class variable in case of the field or a class method in case of a method. Notice that these names contain the word class as an adjective. That is because a static member is associated with a class, not a class instance. It means that there is only one copy of a static member that can exist in JVM memory, although many instances (objects) ...