What does 'public static void' mean in Java?

java methods
David picture David · Mar 5, 2010 · Viewed 526.5k times · Source

What does public static void mean in Java?

I'm in the process of learning. In all the examples in the book I'm working from public static void comes before any method that is being used or created. What does this mean?

Answer

Mark Byers picture Mark Byers · Mar 5, 2010

It's three completely different things:

public means that the method is visible and can be called from other objects of other types. Other alternatives are private, protected, package and package-private. See here for more details.

static means that the method is associated with the class, not a specific instance (object) of that class. This means that you can call a static method without creating an object of the class.

void means that the method has no return value. If the method returned an int you would write int instead of void.

The combination of all three of these is most commonly seen on the main method which most tutorials will include.

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