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

Each package name ("a.b.c") is a discrete package. Two packages with similar naming prefix ("a.b.c" and "a.b.d", for example) are separate packages for the language, both for namespaces and for access control.

For humans, of course, this represents a possible relation between the packages.