Why Can You Instantiate a Class within its Definition?

Question

A coworker (who is very new to Java) stopped in today and asked what seemed like a very simple question. Unfortunately, I did an absolutely horrible job of trying to explain

Answer 1

Because code is compiled first, and executed later. All the compiler needs to know to validate that line is that a class named XCopy exists, and that it has a no-argument constructor. It doesn't need to know everything about the class.