Does the private keyword in a class level field declaration actually do anything?

Question

I'm refactoring a bunch of classes, written by different people, which do not have consistent standards. During the course of this, I came to ponder on whether there is any difference between these declarations:

public class foo(){

    int fooBar = 1;

    ......

and

public class foo(){

    private int fooBar = 1;

    ......

Please note that this is a question of semantics, I am fully aware of scoping, encapsulation etc. The question is, does using the private scope annotation in a class field do anything?

Thanks for all thoughts..

(PS. My current level of understanding says there is no difference)

Answer 1

Absolutely there is a difference. The default access level for a class member in Java is package-private, not private. This means that in the first version any class in the same package as Foo can access fooBar, while in the second version this is not the case.