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Can anyone explain this code related to shadowing in Java?

Tags:

java

shadowing

While going through Oracle docs reading about Nested classes, I found this piece of code whose output I could not understand. Can someone please explain this ?

public class ShadowTest {

    public int x = 0;

    class FirstLevel {

        public int x = 1;

        void methodInFirstLevel(int x) {
            System.out.println("x = " + x);
            System.out.println("this.x = " + this.x);
            System.out.println("ShadowTest.this.x = " + ShadowTest.this.x);
        }
    }

    public static void main(String... args) {
        ShadowTest st = new ShadowTest();
        ShadowTest.FirstLevel fl = st.new FirstLevel();
        fl.methodInFirstLevel(23);
    }
}

The following is the output of this example:

x = 23
this.x = 1
ShadowTest.this.x = 0 //why is 0 printed here? why not 1 because "this" is the object of FirstLevel class.

The original code can be found here

like image 592
Rishabh Gour Avatar asked Mar 15 '23 05:03

Rishabh Gour


1 Answers

The local variable x shadows this.x and ShadowTest.this.x.

The instance variable of the inner class (this.x) shadows the instance variable of the enclosing class (which can be accessed by ShadowTest.this.x).

System.out.println("x = " + x); // prints the local variable passed to the method
System.out.println("this.x = " + this.x); // prints the instance variable of the inner class
System.out.println("ShadowTest.this.x = " + ShadowTest.this.x); // prints the instance variable of the enclosing class instance
like image 194
Eran Avatar answered Apr 06 '23 04:04

Eran