Bill Pugh writes:

The documentation for Field is unclear. It could easily be interpreted as
through setAccessible applies to the field, not the Field object:

> If the underlying field is final, the method throws an IllegalAccessException unless setAccessible(true) has succeeded for this field and this field is non-static.

I think th should be changed to something like.

> If the underlying field is final, the method throws an IllegalAccessException unless isAccessible(true) is true for this Field object and this Field object represents a non-static field.


In general, whenever the JavaDoc talks about whether setAccessible has been called for a field,
it should be referring to whether isAccessible returns true for the <code>Field</code> object. Same for
other subtypes of AccessibleObject.