The best and most helpful answer depends on the context of the question, which is, I believe, not completely obvious.
If the question was a novice question about the intended meaning of private, then the answer "no" is completely appropriate. That is:
- private members of A are accessible only within class A
- package-private members of A are accessible only within classes in A's package
- protected members of A are accessible only within classes in A's package and subclasses of A
- public members of A are accessible anywhere A is visible.
Now, if, and okay maybe this is a stretch (thank you Brian :) ), that the question came from a more "advanced" context where one is looking at the question of "I know private means private but is there a language loophole", then, well, there is such a loophole. It goes like this:
import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;
class C {
private int x = 10;
private void hello() {System.out.println("Well hello there");}
}
public class PrivateAccessDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
C c = new C();
List<Field> fields = Arrays.asList(C.class.getDeclaredFields());
for (Field f: fields) {
f.setAccessible(true);
System.out.println(f.getName() + " = " + f.get(c));
}
List<Method> methods = Arrays.asList(C.class.getDeclaredMethods());
for (Method m: methods) {
m.setAccessible(true);
m.invoke(c);
}
}
}
Output:
x = 10
Well hello there
Of course, this really isn't something that application programmers would ever do. But the fact that such a thing can be done is worthwhile to know, and not something that should be ignored. IMHO anyway.
