Initiating variables with private constructor fails

Question

Goodday all,
At the moment I'm working on a little class that reads the input from the console screen. The class looks like this (I omitted a few unrelevant methods):
public class SomeClass {
  private static BufferedReader bin = null;
  // private constructor; another method (not shown here) returns an instance
  private SomeClass() {
    bin = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));//somehow this doesn't work ??????
  //public method
  public final String readLine(String message) {     
          String feedback = "";
          try {
               if(bin==null) say("variable bin is null"); //bin is indeed null, just don't know why
               else feedback = bin.readLine();
          catch (IOException e) {
               e.printStackTrace();
          return feedback;
}Executing this code will result in output "variable bin is null". When I try debugging it, I see that the variable bin will remain null when the constructor is called.
Placing the initiation of 'bin' in another method will make things work, but I want to know why it doesn't work in the constructor. It seems as a fair piece of code ;).

Answer 1

private static BufferedReader bin = null;Why is it static?
// private constructor; another method (not shown here) returns an instance
private SomeClass() {
bin = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));//somehow this doesn't work ??????
}'Somehow it fails?' It doesn't even compile!
Executing this code will result in output "variable bin is null". When I try debugging it, I see that the variable bin will remain null when the constructor is called.Your constructor doesn't even compile, so I find it hard to believe it ever executed.