Private methods in Inheritance

Question

Here\'s an interesting code snippet:

public class Superclass {

    public static void main (String[] args){
        Superclass obj = new Subclass();
                


        

Answer 1

When we define a private method with the same name in the derived class, it becomes a new method as derived class don't inherit the private members.

Since the private method is not even visible outside the class, we can never call a base class private method from a derived class, it will throw a compilation error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.Error: Unresolved compilation problem: The method aPrivateMethod() from the type Base is not visible

We can use down casting to the parent class reference to call the derived class private method, which can only be accessed in that derived class.