Does main need to be public?

Question

I'm a little confused as to why the following code works...
public class FirstClass {
    //public static void main( String[] args ) {
    //    System.out.println("Public main()");
    private static void main( String[] args ) {
        System.out.println("Private main()");
}This is being run on 1.2.2. I was under the impression that main needed to be public for the system to call it. But when I run this it prints 'Private main()' to screen. This is also true if I make main protected.
Any ideas as to why this still works?
Thanks
Ade

Answer 1

It seems that the main signature does matter, but the
access modifier doesn't.Both the JLS and the JVM specs require that the main method to be public (note however that you are allowed to have a private, static, void method that takes a single String-array argument, but it should not be considered an application entry-point).
This was a bug introduced into Sun's VMs with early 1.2 releases; Originally there was no intention to fix it, but eventually they decided to do so, and it was fixed for 1.4.
If you do not declare your main methods public, static and void, you will find that your applications stop working one day when you switch Java versions, or when you roll the code out to clients using a different version to that which you developed and tested the apps on.