I need to declare private, public and static variables in java, is there any specific order to follow in declaration of these variables?

Question

I need to declare private, public and static variables in java, is there any specific order to follow in declaration of these variables

public class Test  
{ 

    private String name;  
    public String address;  
    private static final String DR_NO = "1-44-54/4";  

}

Is there any specification to declare these variables?

Answer 1

No, you can declare fields in whichever order you want. Same for methods, constructors, and inner classes.

The only thing to watch out for is that: static fields will be initialized before instance fields (of course), but static fields and instance fields will be initialized in the order you declared them.

So if you had this:

class A {
    static String b = "hello ";
    static String a = b + " world";
    static void print() {System.out.println(a);}
}

then calling print prints "hello world", but if you had this:

class A {
    static String a = b + " world";
    static String b = "hello ";
    static void print() {System.out.println(a);}
}

then it would print "null world", as b contained the value null when a was initialized.