Scope of Public Access Modifier in Java

The public modifier has the widest scope. When a class or its members declared public they are accessible from everywhere. A default class or its members are available to any other class in the same package.

However, if the public class we are trying to access is in a different package, then the public class still needs to be imported. Because of class inheritance, all public methods and variables of a class are inherited by its subclasses.

Example

The following function uses public access control −

public static void main(String[] arguments) {
   // ...
}

The main() method of an application has to be public. Otherwise, it could not be called by a Java interpreter (such as java) to run the class.