Usage of Constant

[Badri Sarma]

1. public final String str="USA";
2. public static final String str="USA";

Can I use the keyword "constant" in either of these statements?

[Stefan Krompass]

Constants are declared like this:

public static final String MY_PERSONAL_STRING_CONSTANT = "myConstant"

There is no keyword constant in Java.

cu

Stefan

[Badri Sarma]

Thank you Stefan.

I want to know the difference between the two statements I have mentioned. Can you help me?

Badri

[Jon Poulton]

The only difference between the two is the usage of the "static" keyword. "static" means that there is only 1 instance of the the variable PER CLASS. So even if you create 10000000 objects there will only be 1 instance of a given static variable belonging to the class.
Example:

class A
{
private static int val = 0;
public A()
{ }

public printVal()
{
System.out.println(val);
}

// Static method called by doing A.increment will
// increment val for all instances of A.
public static increment()
{
val++;
}
}

Every time you call A.increment is will increment the single static variable shared by all of the A objects. Thus, whenever printVal is called on A it simply prints out the number of times increment has been called.
Jon