Java Riddle: Static Members in Inner Classes?

Wow, really confusing. I tried to use javac, and have a similar error whith the second constant :

Main.java:6: inner classes cannot have static declarations 

 But not with the int nor with a String.  

Does someone have an explanation ?

Read "8.1.3 Inner Classes and Enclosing Instances" in JLS

Ok. This is logical, but lacks consistency, they could have disabled constants even for primitives to have the same behaviour for all types.

(Suppress primitives in java would be harder than I thought)

This allows be to bitch, once again, about the classfile's poor constant pools. We should be able to define "compile-time literals" of ANY type; the only restriction should be that initialization should depend only on trivial constructors (i.e., constructors that only initialize fields with values that are compile-time constants, or derived from compile-time constants wothout invoking any external method - e.g. "this.x = 10 * xParameter") so the compiler could easily evaluate the constructor code at compilation time. This would cover >90% of all constructors out there. Notice that this optimization is easy and implemented in many anguages. Java's strong portability makes it easy, for example you could even evaluate at compile time an API calls like java.lang.Math.cos(), because its behavior is portable so a result generated at compile time in platform X is acceptable when the code is ran on platform Y, which makes safe to move evaluation from runtime to compile time. And of course, the constant pool should also support arays properly, so array initialization expressions don't need to be encoded as a horribly inefficient stream of bytecodes that assign each index. These limitations hurt startup time, and also data sharing: if we get smarter constant pools that can also guarantee deep immutability (which is a separated RFE), all that data could be easily shared among processes.

I'd never tought anybody would want to write code like that.

Let us not forget how one instantiates an inner class

new TestInnerStaticFinal().new MyInner();

this might give a hint. An inner class can only live within an outer class, but if statics were allowed it could live outside the outer class which would defeat the purpuse of inner class at least this is how I see it.