The Java™

Language Specification
Second Edition
The Java™ Series
Lisa Friendly, Series Editor
Bill Joy, Technical Advisor

The Java™ Programming Language

Ken Arnold and James Gosling
ISBN 0-201-63455-4

The Java™ Language Specification Second Edition

James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele and Gilad Bracha
ISBN 0-201-31008-2

The Java™ Virtual Machine Specification Second Edition

Tim Lindholm and Frank Yellin
ISBN 0-201-43294-3

The Java™ Application Programming Interface,

Volume 1: Core Packages
James Gosling, Frank Yellin, and the Java Team
ISBN 0-201-63452-X

The Java™ Application Programming Interface,

Volume 2: Window Toolkit and Applets
James Gosling, Frank Yellin, and the Java Team
ISBN 0-201-63459-7

The Java™ Tutorial: Object-Oriented Programming for the Internet

Mary Campione and Kathy Walrath
ISBN 0-201-63454-6

The Java™ Class Libraries: An Annotated Reference

Patrick Chan and Rosanna Lee
ISBN 0-201-63458-9

The Java™ FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

Jonni Kanerva
ISBN 0-201-63456-2
 The Java™
Language Specification
Second Edition
James Gosling
Bill Joy
Guy Steele
Gilad Bracha

ADDISON-WESLEY
An imprint of Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.
Reading, Massachusetts Harlow, England Menlo Park, California
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Berkeley, California Don Mills, Ontario Sydney

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Bonn Amsterdam Tokyo Mexico City

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Copyright  1996-2000 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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First printing, June 2000
 Table of Contents

Table of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix

Preface to the Second Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii

1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Example Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2 Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Relationship to Predefined Classes and Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2 Grammars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1 Context-Free Grammars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.2 The Lexical Grammar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.3 The Syntactic Grammar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.4 Grammar Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3 Lexical Structure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.1 Unicode. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.2 Lexical Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.3 Unicode Escapes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.4 Line Terminators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.5 Input Elements and Tokens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.6 White Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.7 Comments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.8 Identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.9 Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.10 Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.10.1 Integer Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.10.2 Floating-Point Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.10.3 Boolean Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.10.4 Character Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.10.5 String Literals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.10.6 Escape Sequences for Character and String Literals . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.10.7 The Null Literal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
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3.11 Separators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.12 Operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

4 Types, Values, and Variables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

4.1 The Kinds of Types and Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
4.2 Primitive Types and Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
4.2.1 Integral Types and Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.2.2 Integer Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.2.3 Floating-Point Types, Formats, and Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
4.2.4 Floating-Point Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.2.5 The boolean Type and boolean Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.3 Reference Types and Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.3.1 Objects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4.3.2 The Class Object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.3.3 The Class String . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.3.4 When Reference Types Are the Same . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
4.4 Where Types Are Used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.5 Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
4.5.1 Variables of Primitive Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.5.2 Variables of Reference Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.5.3 Kinds of Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.5.4 final Variables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.5.5 Initial Values of Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
4.5.6 Types, Classes, and Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

5 Conversions and Promotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

5.1 Kinds of Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
5.1.1 Identity Conversions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
5.1.2 Widening Primitive Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
5.1.3 Narrowing Primitive Conversions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5.1.4 Widening Reference Conversions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
5.1.5 Narrowing Reference Conversions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5.1.6 String Conversions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.1.7 Forbidden Conversions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.1.8 Value Set Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5.2 Assignment Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5.3 Method Invocation Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
5.4 String Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5.5 Casting Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5.6 Numeric Promotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.6.1 Unary Numeric Promotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
5.6.2 Binary Numeric Promotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

6 Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6.1 Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

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6.2 Names and Identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

6.3 Scope of a Declaration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
6.3.1 Shadowing Declarations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
6.3.2 Obscured Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.4 Members and Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.4.1 The Members of a Package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.4.2 The Members of a Class Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
6.4.3 The Members of an Interface Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
6.4.4 The Members of an Array Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
6.5 Determining the Meaning of a Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
6.5.1 Syntactic Classification of a Name According to Context. . . . . . 94
6.5.2 Reclassification of Contextually Ambiguous Names. . . . . . . . . . 96
6.5.3 Meaning of Package Names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.5.3.1 Simple Package Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.5.3.2 Qualified Package Names. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.5.4 Meaning of PackageOrTypeNames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.5.4.1 Simple PackageOrTypeNames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.5.4.2 Qualified PackageOrTypeNames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
6.5.5 Meaning of Type Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
6.5.5.1 Simple Type Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
6.5.5.2 Qualified Type Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.5.6 Meaning of Expression Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.5.6.1 Simple Expression Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.5.6.2 Qualified Expression Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
6.5.7 Meaning of Method Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.5.7.1 Simple Method Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.5.7.2 Qualified Method Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.6 Access Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.6.1 Determining Accessibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
6.6.2 Details on protected Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
6.6.2.1 Access to a protected Member . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.6.2.2 Qualified Access to a protected Constructor. . . . . 106
6.6.3 An Example of Access Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.6.4 Example: Access to public and Non-public Classes . . . . . . . 107
6.6.5 Example: Default-Access Fields, Methods, and Constructors. . 108
6.6.6 Example: public Fields, Methods, and Constructors . . . . . . . . 109
6.6.7 Example: protected Fields, Methods, and Constructors . . . . . 110
6.6.8 Example: private Fields, Methods, and Constructors . . . . . . . 111
6.7 Fully Qualified Names and Canonical Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.8 Naming Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6.8.1 Package Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6.8.2 Class and Interface Type Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
6.8.3 Method Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
6.8.4 Field Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
6.8.5 Constant Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
6.8.6 Local Variable and Parameter Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

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7 Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
7.1 Package Members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
7.2 Host Support for Packages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
7.2.1 Storing Packages in a File System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
7.2.2 Storing Packages in a Database. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
7.3 Compilation Units . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
7.4 Package Declarations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
7.4.1 Named Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
7.4.2 Unnamed Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
7.4.3 Observability of a Package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
7.4.4 Scope of a Package Declaration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
7.5 Import Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
7.5.1 Single-Type-Import Declaration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
7.5.2 Type-Import-on-Demand Declaration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
7.5.3 Automatic Imports. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7.5.4 A Strange Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7.6 Top Level Type Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
7.7 Unique Package Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

8 Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
8.1 Class Declaration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
8.1.1 Class Modifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
8.1.1.1 abstract Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
8.1.1.2 final Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
8.1.1.3 strictfp Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
8.1.2 Inner Classes and Enclosing Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
8.1.3 Superclasses and Subclasses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
8.1.4 Superinterfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
8.1.5 Class Body and Member Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
8.2 Class Members. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
8.2.1 Examples of Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
8.2.1.1 Example: Inheritance with Default Access . . . . . . . . 149
8.2.1.2 Inheritance with public and protected . . . . . . . . . 150
8.2.1.3 Inheritance with private . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
8.2.1.4 Accessing Members of Inaccessible Classes. . . . . . . 151
8.3 Field Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
8.3.1 Field Modifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
8.3.1.1 static Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
8.3.1.2 final Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
8.3.1.3 transient Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
8.3.1.4 volatile Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
8.3.2 Initialization of Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
8.3.2.1 Initializers for Class Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
8.3.2.2 Initializers for Instance Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
8.3.2.3 Restrictions on the use of Fields during Initialization160
8.3.3 Examples of Field Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
8.3.3.1 Example: Hiding of Class Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162