>>>>> "Ito" == Ito Kazumitsu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Ito> The Java Language Specification, Third Edition says: Ito> |6.6.1 Determining Accessibility Ito> Why "the top level class" ? At this level it is a language design decision. The idea is that all the code defined within the scope of a top-level class can share implementation details. I suppose the thinking is that, because the member and its users are lexically close, this is safe enough to promote as a general practice. Also, there are no binary compatibility issues here. Ito> What if the private member is declared in an inner class? >From a language semantics point of view, that is definitely allowed by the JLS. It isn't unreasonable from a design point of view, just a choice... >From a compiler point of view, you have to emit accessor methods in these cases, because to the JVM all classes are top-level classes, and there are no special access rules for this. This is a pain; Classpath avoids private accesses across class boundaries for this reason. Tom _______________________________________________ kaffe mailing list kaffe@kaffe.org http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe