Why should the static field be accessed in a static way?

Question

public enum MyUnits
{
    MILLSECONDS(1, \"milliseconds\"), SECONDS(2, \"seconds\"),MINUTES(3,\"minutes\"), HOURS(4, \"hours\");

    private MyUnits(int quantity, S         


        

Answer 1

There's actually a good reason:
The non-static access does not always work, for reasons of ambiguity.

Suppose we have two classes, A and B, the latter being a subclass of A, with static fields with the same name:

public class A {
    public static String VALUE = "Aaa";
}

public class B extends A {
    public static String VALUE = "Bbb";
}

Direct access to the static variable:

A.VALUE (="Aaa")
B.VALUE (="Bbb")

Indirect access using an instance (gives a compiler warning that VALUE should be statically accessed):

new B().VALUE (="Bbb")

So far, so good, the compiler can guess which static variable to use, the one on the superclass is somehow farther away, seems somehow logical.

Now to the point where it gets tricky: Interfaces can also have static variables.

public interface C {
    public static String VALUE = "Ccc";
}

public interface D {
    public static String VALUE = "Ddd";
}

Let's remove the static variable from B, and observe following situations:

• B implements C, D
• B extends A implements C
• B extends A implements C, D
• B extends A implements C where A implements D
• B extends A implements C where C extends D
• ...

The statement new B().VALUE is now ambiguous, as the compiler cannot decide which static variable was meant, and will report it as an error:

error: reference to VALUE is ambiguous
both variable VALUE in C and variable VALUE in D match

And that's exactly the reason why static variables should be accessed in a static way.