Hello Torkel

       Can u explain more detail on your last sentence  " I assume a
"with default access" is implicit after "member
variables". But default access applies to types in anonymous packages
as well. I am not quite understand. Thanks

Oops...Sorry about that!  Yes, you are correct.  These keywords (which
are access specifiers) are modifiers in declarative statements such as:

public static void main(String[] args) {}
public String getName() {}
private int number;

I just checked, and like you said, the Java specification states that
these access specifiers are used to modify the *visibility* of classes,
methods, and member variables.

I wasn't thinking about them as modifiers because I learned C++ before
Java.  The term, access specifiers, comes from C++, and I just
continued to think of public, private, protected, and package the same
way in Java.  As you may already know, in C++, these access specifiers
aren't used in front of every declaration.  So you would write
something like:

class A
   {
   private:
       int b;

   public:
       A()
           {
           }
   }

public and private are considered access declarations in the C++
specification.

As I mentioned, a class is a user-defined type.  Therefore, it can be
used to declare variables like a built-in type.  For example:

public class Test
   {
   //
   }

Test test = new Test();

The variable, test, is declared to be of type Test.  This is just like
saying:

int count = 0;

declares the variable, count, to be of type of type int.

Hope this helps...

Sincerely,

Mike.

--- ACGNJ Java Users Group (http://www.javasig.org/)

I noticed it long ago when I wrote one of the early entries in the
Java glossary on scope. I puzzled what to label the default scope in a
table of what is visible from what with the various scopes.

I also yearned to have an explicit keyword to specify the default
keyword.  when there is nothing I could not tell the difference
between "I forgot to specify a scope" and "I deliberately wanted the
default scope."