Access and Non Access Modifiers in Java

Java provides a rich set of modifiers. They are used to control access mechanisms and also provide information about class functionalities to JVM. They are divided into two categories namely:

Access modifiers
Non-access modifiers

Access Modifiers

Java’s access modifiers are public, private, and protected. Java also defines a default access level (called package-private).

public: When a member of a class is modified by public, then that member can be accessed by any other code.
private: When a member of a class is specified as private, then that member can only be accessed by other members of its class.
default: It is also referred to as no modifier. Whenever we do not use any access modifier it is treated as default where this allows us to access within a class, within a subclass, and also non-sun class within a package but when the package differs now be it a subclass or non-class we are not able to access.
protected: With the above default keyword we were facing an issue as we are getting closer to the real world with the above default modifier but there was a constriction as we are not able to access class sub-class from a different package. So protected access modifier allows not only to access class be it subclass or non-sub class but allows us to access subclass of the different package which brings us very close to a real-world and hence strong understanding of inheritance is required for understanding and implementing this keyword.

Types of Access Modifiers

Note: Now you can understand why main( ) has always been preceded by the public modifier. It is called by code that is outside the program—that is, by the Java run-time system. When no access modifier is used, then by default the member of a class is public within its own package, but cannot be accessed outside of its package. protected applies only when inheritance is involved.

class GFG 
{
public static void main(String[] args) 
    { 
        // Insert your code here 
    }
}

Non-access Modifiers

In java, we have 7 non-access modifiers. They are used with classes, methods, variables, constructors, etc to provide information about their behavior to JVM. They are as follows:

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Java