Java 11 and 12 – New Features

Accessing the state and behavior of enum constants

At present, an enum constant can access the following:

• The state and behavior common to all enum constants
• Overridden methods

For the Size enum (defined in the preceding section), you can access the state and behavior common to all enum constants, as follows:

System.out.println(Size.SMALL.toText());  // toString is defined for all constants 

The preceding code will have the following output:

36 X 19 

You can also access the behavior that a specific enum constant overrides as follows:

System.out.println(Size.LARGE.toText()); 

The preceding code will have the following output:

LARGE

However, you can't access the state or behavior that is specific to an enum constant, as shown in ...