How does the “this” keyword in Java inheritance work?

Question

In the below code snippet, the result is really confusing.

public class TestInheritance {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Son();
                


        

Answer 1

This is a behaviour done specially to have access to private members. So this.x looks at the variable X which is declared for Father, but when you pass this as a parameter to System.out.println in a method in Father - it looks at the method to call depending on the type of the parameter - in your case Son.

So how do you call the super classes method? Using super.toString(), etc.

From Father it cannot access the x variable of Son.