Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

10.6. final Methods and Classes

We saw in Section 6.10 that variables can be declared final to indicate that they cannot be modified after they are initialized—such variables represent constant values. It is also possible to declare methods and classes with the final modifier.

A method that is declared final in a superclass cannot be overridden in a subclass. Methods that are declared private are implicitly final, because it is impossible to override them in a subclass. Methods that are declared static are also implicitly final. A final method’s declaration can never change, so all subclasses use the same method implementation, and calls to final methods are resolved at compile time—this is known as static binding. Since the compiler knows that ...