Programmer's Guide to Java™ Certification, A: A Comprehensive Primer, Second Edition

4.5. Scope Rules

Java provides explicit accessibility modifiers to control the accessibility of members in a class by external clients (see Section 4.9, p. 137), but in two areas access is governed by specific scope rules:

• Class scope for members: how member declarations are accessed within the class.

• Block scope for local variables: how local variable declarations are accessed within a block.

Class Scope for Members

Class scope concerns accessing members (including inherited ones) from code within a class. Table 4.1 gives an overview of how static and non-static code in a class can access members of the class, including those that are inherited. Table 4.1 assumes the following declarations:

 class SuperName { int instanceVarInSuper; static ...