Is final ill-defined?

Question

First, a puzzle: What does the following code print?

public class RecursiveStatic {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(scale         


        

Answer 1

Not a bug.

When the first call to scale is called from

private static final long X = scale(10);

It tries to evaluate return X * value. X has not been assigned a value yet and therefore the default value for a long is used (which is 0).

So that line of code evaluates to X * 10 i.e. 0 * 10 which is 0.