What’s going on here?
You’ve misunderstood the meaning of protected
. You can access the protected members declared in A
from within C
, but only for instances of C
or subclasses of C
. See section 6.6.2 of the JLS for details of protected access. In particular:
Let C be the class in which a protected member is declared. Access is permitted only within the body of a subclass S of C.
In addition, if Id denotes an instance field or instance method, then:
[…]
If the access is by a field access expression E.Id, where E is a Primary expression, or by a method invocation expression E.Id(. . .), where E is a Primary expression, then the access is permitted if and only if the type of E is S or a subclass of S.
(Emphasis mine.)
So this code would be fine:
C c = new C();
System.out.println(c.publicInt);
System.out.println(c.protectedInt);