Declarations, Initialization, and Scoping - SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java Platform SE6 - page 132

The child method cannot throw a greater exception than the parent. In other words,
any exception thrown by the child method must be a subclass of one of the exceptions
thrown by the parent method.
The return type of the method in the child class has to be the same or a subclass of the
parent method's return type.
Private Methods and Overriding
Method overriding refers to a child class overriding an instance method that it inherits
from its parent. A private method is not accessible outside of the class it is defi ned
in, and private methods are not inherited by child classes. Therefore, any discussion
on method overriding implies we are talking about the nonprivate instance methods of
a class. (We discuss overriding nonprivate static methods in the upcoming section on
method hiding.)
The following example demonstrates a child class Lion overriding the eat method in its
parent class Mammal :
//Mammal.java
public class Mammal {
protected int eat(String something) {
System.out.println(“Inside Mammal”);
return -1;
}
}
//Lion.java
public class Lion extends Mammal {
public int eat(String something) {
. System.out.println(“Inside Lion”);
. return something.length();
. }
}
Notice the eat method in Lion has the same name and parameter type as eat in Mammal .
The eat method is protected in Mammal and public in Lion , which is valid because public
is more accessible than protected , so Lion successfully overrides the eat method in Mammal .
What is the output of the following statements?