CLASSES

Method Declarations

8.4

class PaintedPoint extends ColoredPoint implements Paintable

{

. . .

RED

 . . .

}

the fields

RED

,

GREEN

, and

BLUE

 are inherited by the class

PaintedPoint

 both

through its direct superclass

ColoredPoint

 and through its direct superinterface

Paintable

. The simple names

RED

,

GREEN

, and

BLUE

 may nevertheless be used

without ambiguity within the class

PaintedPoint

 to refer to the fields declared in

interface

Colorable

.

8.4   Method Declarations

The diversity of physical arguments and opinions embraces all sorts of methods.

 Michael de Montaigne (1533 1592),

Of Experience

A

method

 declares executable code that can be invoked, passing a fixed number of

values as arguments.

MethodDeclaration:

MethodHeader MethodBody

MethodHeader:

MethodModifiers

opt

ResultType MethodDeclarator Throws

opt

ResultType:

Type

void

MethodDeclarator:

Identifer

 (

FormalParameterList

opt

 )

The

MethodModifiers

 are described in  8.4.3, the

Throws

 clause in  8.4.4, and the

MethodBody

 in  8.4.5. A method declaration either specifies the type of value that

the method returns or uses the keyword

void

 to indicate that the method does not

return a value.

The

Identifier

 in a

MethodDeclarator

 may be used in a name to refer to the

method. A class can declare a method with the same name as the class or a field of

the class.

For compatibility with older versions of Java, a declaration form for a method

that returns an array is allowed to place (some or all of) the empty bracket pairs

that form the declaration of the array type after the parameter list. This is sup 

ported by the obsolescent production:

155