Khalid Mughal posted the following on July 09, 2001 in the Programmers Certification Study forum in response to a similar question.
JLS quote:
"An anonymous class is never abstract (�8.1.1.1). An anonymous class is always an inner class (�8.1.2); it is never static (�8.1.1, �8.5.2). An anonymous class is always implicitly final (�8.1.1.2)."
If you look carefully you will see that the
word "static" refers to the keyword in the above quote. I choose to interpret this as meaning that an anonymous class cannot be declared static (<--- keyword).
In our explanation, we are using the word "static" in the non-keyword sense of the word to indicate "an anonymous class declaration in a static context". As the examples presented in this discussion have shown, an anonymous class declared in a static context cannot access instance members in its enclosing context. This is the point we wanted to get across and the fact that such a class is instantiated without any outer object.
We will make sure that such confusion about terminology does not arise in any future edition of the book.
wbw,
khalid mughal
