Why is Java prohibiting inheritance of inner interfaces?

Question

I.e. why is the following \"cyclic dependency\" not possible?

public class Something implements Behavior {
    public interface Behavior {
        // ...
    }
}         


        

Answer 1

The simple fact that the language specs forbid it should be enough.

Some reasons I could think of:

• It wouldn't be useful.

• For whatever reasons you might want to use this, I'm sure there exist better options.

• Child classes should extend base classes, so why would you declare a base class inside its own child?

• It would be counter-intuitive having a separate class extend your inner-class.