Why can a class not be defined as protected?

Question

Why can we not define a class as protected?

I know that we can\'t, but why? There should be some specific reason.

Answer 1

Defining a field protected makes that field accessible inside the package as well as outside the package through inheritance only (Only inside the child class).

So If we are allowed to make a class protected then we can access it inside the package very easily but for accessing that class outside of the package we first need to extend that entity in which this class is defined which is its package.

And since a package can not be extended (can be imported), defining a class protected will again make it package-private which is similar to defining it as default which we can already do. Therefore there is no benefit of defining a class private it will only make things ambiguous.

For more information read Why an outer Java class can’t be private or protected