groovy static class

Question

What does the 'static' do in this file, sample.groovy?

static class froob {
}

The groovy code compiles fine with 'static' or without it.

Answer 1

There is absolutely no difference. The static in this situation is ignored.

To test, I created a groovy class and piped the output of "javap -verbose StaticTest" to a file. Then put "static" before the class def and piped that to a 2nd file. I then diffed the two files. The only differences were those unique ids that are associated with the long class ID that gets generated new for every class.