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Oddities and Errors

If you have both object methods and class methods in the same class definition, it is easy to get confused. A common way to organize a class definition is to put all the constructors at the beginning, followed by all the object methods and then all the class methods.

You can have an object method and a class method with the same name, as long as they do not have the same number and types of parameters. As with other kinds of overloading, Java decides which version to invoke by looking at the arguments you provide.

Now that we know what the keyword static means, you have probably figured out that main is a class method, which means that there is no "current object" when it is invoked.

Since there is no current object in a class method, it is an error to use the keyword this. If you try, you might get an error message like: "Undefined variable: this." Also, you cannot refer to instance variables without using dot notation and providing an object name. If you try, you might get "Can't make a static reference to nonstatic variable..." This is not one of the better error messages, since it uses some non-standard language. For example, by "nonstatic variable" it means "instance variable." But once you know what it means, you know what it means.



Last Update: 2011-01-24