Shouldn't “import foo.*” also include subpackage “foo.bar.*”?

Question

Studying Java, I\'ve thought about a, to me, rather confusing property of many tutorials. Consider the following two imports from a sample tutorial:

import j         


        

Answer 1

No, packages are taken as a whole. Even though it's often useful to think of them hierarchically, there is no notion within the Java language or compilation that says java.awt.event belongs to java.awt.

Your comparison with SQL tables isn't quite right because there's no such thing as a sub-table in SQL databases. Instead, imagine you had a table representing all your classes, with the following entries:

ID | Package   | Name
--------------------------
1  | awt       | SomeClassName1
2  | awt.event | SomeClassName2

Now, if you wanted to get awt classes, you'd say:

SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE Package = 'awt'

You wouldn't expect this to give you both entries, just because the package name starts with awt, would you?