The Different Levels of Access Control
Access Control and Inheritance
One last issue regarding access control for methods involves subclasses. When you cre-
ate a subclass and override a method, you must consider the access control in place on
the original method.
As a general rule, you cannot override a method in Java and make the new method more
restrictively controlled than the original. You can, however, make it more public. The fol-
lowing rules for inherited methods are enforced:
* Methods declared public in a superclass also must be public in all subclasses.
* Methods declared protected in a superclass must either be protected or public
in subclasses; they cannot be private.
* Methods declared without access control (no modifier was used) can be declared
more private in subclasses.
* Methods declared private are not inherited at all, so the rules don’t apply.