6.6 Qualified Names and Access Control

6.6 Qualified Names and Access Control

Qualified names are a means of access to members of packages and reference types; related means of access include field access expressions (§15.10) and method invocation expressions (§15.11). All three are syntactically similar in that a "." token appears, preceded by some indication of a package, type, or expression having a type and followed by an Identifier that names a member of the package or type. These are collectively known as constructs for qualified access.

Java provides mechanisms for access control, to prevent the users of a package or class from depending on unnecessary details of the implementation of that package or class. Access control applies to qualified access and to the invocation of constructors by class instance creation expressions (§15.8), explicit constructor invocations (§8.6.5), and the method newInstance of class Class(§20.3.6).

If access is permitted, then the accessed entity is said to be accessible.