What becomes the visibility of protected members in a subclass?-CodePudding

I have a class A with a protected member :

package p1;   
public class A{
      protected int number;
}

Now I've subclassed it in another package :

package p2;
public class B extends A{}

Now in the main class :

package p3;
public class Main{
   public static void main(String[] args){
        B b = new B();
        System.out.println(b.number);
   }
}

This executes perfectly. What is the visibility of protected members in subclass - do they become public ? Then I tried following which also didn't show any error:

 System.out.println(new A().number);

After seeing this I've came to conclusion that I'm doing something really silly or misunderstood the use of protected specifier. The way I learnt : protected members can only be accessed within subclasses irrespective of packages and they remained in the same viasibilty. But the way I'm able to access the member number like a public variable even in the parent class.

Please help me understand what is happening here.

CodePudding user response：

Variables, methods, and constructors, which are declared protected in a superclass can be accessed only by the subclasses in other package or any class within the package of the protected members' class.

You can read more about this here