Which access specifier is by default in java

In enums, constructors are private by default. Indeed, enum contructors must be private, and it is an error to specify them as public or protected. Enum constants are always public , and do not permit any access specifier. Other members of enums are package-private by default. In interfaces and annotation types, all members again, that means fields, methods, and nested type declarations are public by default. Indeed, members of interfaces and annotation types must be public, and it is an error to specify them as private or protected.

Local classes are named classes declared inside a method, constructor, or initializer block. Anonymous classes are custom classes created with new which specify a class body directly in the expression.

Using reflection, you can instantiate anonymous classes from elsewhere, and both they and their generated constructors are are package-private , although I'm not sure if that detail is in the JLS.

I examined classes compiled by javac and by Eclipse's compiler using a hex editor and found that both generate the method as package-private. The method can only be called by the VM, during class initialization. Instance initializer blocks are not compiled as separate methods; their code is copied into each constructor, so they can't be accessed individually, even by reflection. Using this access modifier will make your class, variable, method or constructor acessible from own class or package, it will be also is set if no access modifier is present.

Official Documentation. Access Modifiers in Java. See here for more details. It's not widely used, and I prefer to be much more specific in my access definitions. Classes can access the members of other classes in the same package. Here is a quote about package level visibility from an interview with James Gosling, the creator of Java:. Bill Venners : Java has four access levels.

The default is package. Or if you had some particular reason that you felt package access should be the default. James Gosling : A package is generally a set of things that are kind of written together. So generically I could have done one of two things. One was force you always to put in a keyword that gives you the domain.

Or I could have had a default value. And then the question is, what makes a sensible default? And I tend to go for what is the least dangerous thing. So public would have been a really bad thing to make the default. Private would probably have been a bad thing to make a default, if only because people actually don't write private methods that often. And same thing with protected. And in looking at a bunch of code that I had, I decided that the most common thing that was reasonably safe was in the package.

But I liked it rather than the friends notion, because with friends you kind of have to enumerate who all of your friends are, and so if you add a new class to a package, then you generally end up having to go to all of the classes in that package and update their friends, which I had always found to be a complete pain in the butt.

But the friends list itself causes sort of a versioning problem. And so there was this notion of a friendly class. And the nice thing that I was making that the default -- I'll solve the problem so what should the keyword be?

For a while there actually was a friendly keyword. But because all the others start with "P," it was "phriendly" with a "PH. Update Java 8 usage of default keyword: As many others have noted The default visibility no keyword. In p1 we have a class a1 where we have declared a variable and a method prefixed public keyword. And in the p2 package, we have a class A2 from where we are trying to access the members of class A1 without inheritance.

So from the above example, we can conclude that public access modifier members can be accessed from anywhere, within the same class as well as from outside the class. And also can be accessed within the same package and also from outside a package. NOTE: If any other developer is using your class, then try to use the most restricted access modifier.

And also try to use a private access modifier, wherever necessary. In the above example, the test method is been overridden in class A2. But the subclass method should have the same visibility or more visibility than the superclass method. Since the subclass method has less scope than the superclass method, we get a compile-time error. If you want to learn more about Java visit Great Learning Academy. Remember Me!

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