To my understanding, the following code should have printed true as output.
However, when I ran this code it is printing false.
From Java docs of Anonymous Classes 15.9.5. :
An anonymous class is always implicitly final
public class Test {
public static void main(String args[]) {
Object o = new Object() {
};
System.out.println("Annonymous class is final: " + Modifier.isFinal(o.getClass().getModifiers()));
}
}
Why this code is behaving like this ?
Note that the wording in the JLS of that particular section has changed significantly since then. It now (JLS 11) reads:
15.9.5. Anonymous Class Declarations:
An anonymous class is never final (§8.1.1.2).
The fact that an anonymous class is not final is relevant in casting, in particular the narrowing reference conversion allowed for the cast operator (§5.5). It is also of interest in subclassing, in that it is impossible to declare a subclass of an anonymous class, despite an anonymous class being non-final, because an anonymous class cannot be named by an extends clause (§8.1.4).
This change in wording was introduced in JLS 9. The semantics of anonymous classes and the behavior of the methods in the question remained unchanged, the intention was to avoid exactly the kind of confusion this question is about.
The ticket that caused the change says:
Longstanding behavior of javac, since 1.3, has been, for the most part, not to treat the classes as 'final'. To address this inconsistency, the specification should be changed to accurately reflect the reference implementation.
Specifically, anonymous classes are almost never generated with the ACC_FINAL flag set. We can't change this longstanding behavior without impacting some serialization clients (this would be permissible, but is unnecessarily disruptive). And we can't faithfully implement Class.getModifers (which promises to provide the "Java language modifiers") without the class files encoding the language's modifiers.