Section 6.7 Static member variables

Suppose that you wanted to write a Student class so that the class could keep track of the number of students it had created. Although you could do this with a global counter variable that is an ugly solution. The right way to do it is to use a static variable. Listing 6.7.1 shows how to do this in Python.

Listing 6.7.2 shows how to do this in Java.

In Listing 6.7.2, notice that we create a static member variable by using the static modifier on the variable declaration. Once a variable has been declared static in Java it can be accessed from inside the class without prefixing the name of the class as we had to do in Python.