Why do inner classes make private methods accessible?

(Edit: expanded on the answer to answer some of the comments)

The compiler takes the inner classes and turns them into top-level classes. Since private methods are only available to the inner class the compiler has to add new “synthetic” methods that have package level access so that the top-level classes have access to it.

Something like this (the $ ones are added by the compiler):

class A 
{
    private void f() 
    {
        final B b;

        b = new B();

        // call changed by the compiler
        b.$g();
    }

    // method generated by the compiler - visible by classes in the same package
    void $f()
    {
        f();
    }
}

class B
{
    private void g() 
    {
        final A a;

        a = new A();

        // call changed by the compiler
        a.$f();
    }

    // method generated by the compiler - visible by classes in the same package
    void $g()
    {
        g();
    }
}

Non-static classes are the same, but they have the addition of a reference to the outer class so that the methods can be called on it.

The reason Java does it this way is that they did not want to require VM changes to support inner classes, so all of the changes had to be at the compiler level.

The compiler takes the inner class and turns it into a top level class (thus, at the VM level there is no such thing as an inner class). The compiler then also has to generate the new “forwarding” methods. They are made at the package level (not public) to ensure that only classes in the same package can access them. The compiler also updated the method calls to the private methods to the generated “forwarding” methods.

You can avoid having the compiler generate the method my declaring the methods as “package” (the absence of public, private, and protected). The downside to that is that any class in the package can call the methods.

Edit:

Yes, you can call the generated (synthetic) method, but DON’T DO THIS!:

import java.lang.reflect.Constructor;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;

public class Main
{
    public static void main(final String[] argv)
        throws Exception
    {
        final Class<?> clazz;

        clazz = Class.forName("NotPrivate$A");        

        for(final Method method : clazz.getDeclaredMethods())
        {
            if(method.isSynthetic())
            {
                final Constructor constructor;
                final Object instance;

                constructor = clazz.getDeclaredConstructor(new Class[0]);
                constructor.setAccessible(true);
                instance = constructor.newInstance();
                method.setAccessible(true);
                method.invoke(null, instance);
            }
        }
    }
}