Inner Classes

[Stephen Pride]

I am studying myself silly with inner classes, and the more I study them, the more confused I become. For instance, I wrote the following piece of code which compiles and runs fine, but I can't understand why it is showing the integer "j" to be 0 (zero) instead of 5 (five). I would think (1) the compiler would croak, (2) I'd get a runtime error, or (3) the value would be 5 ...

class x {
    static int a = 5;
    int b;
    static class z {
        int j = a;
        static int k;
        int getj() { return this.j; }
        static int geta() { return a; }
    }
}
public class xx {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        x.z xxzz = new x().new z();
        System.out.println("x.z.j = " + xxzz.j);
        System.out.println("x.z.k = " + xxzz.k);
        System.out.println("x.z.getj() returned: " + xxzz.getj());
        System.out.println("x.z.geta() returned: " + xxzz.geta());
    }
}

My results ...
x.z.j = 0 // ???
x.z.k = 0
x.z.getj() returned: 0 // ???
x.z.geta() returned: 5
[I added UBB CODE tags to your source code to make it more readable. Please try to use them in the future. Learn more about UBB codes - Ajith]
[This message has been edited by Ajith Kallambella (edited September 15, 2000).]

[Stephen Pride]

Sorry, I had JDK 1.1.7 when I ran this test. When I put on JDK 1.3, it ran as I thought it might ...
x.z.j = 5
x.z.k = 0
x.z.getj() returned: 5
x.z.geta() returned: 5