The compiler will report illegal forward reference when it encounters static int x = y;. This is because source code is compiled from the top down, and the compiler hasn’t yet seen y.

You could avoid the “lack of type safety” and “not enough information” problems by using java.lang.String constants. For example, you might specify static final String DIR_NORTH = "NORTH";.

In Java, you can have a section of code inside a class definition that looks like this:code: static { // statements go here }and the statements will be executed when the class is loaded (sort of ...