Description Jeff Brown 2002-03-21 19:17:15 EST

Sometimes in the course of refactoring, I'll realize that I've got
an inner class that does not reference the outer class's fields in
any way, so I mark it 'static'.  Later on, I want to move this static
inner class to its own compilation unit, or (rarely) to inside some
other class.

In the most common case, Inner has no references to any members
or fields of Outer, and all I want to do is grab it and create
a new compilation unit.
e.g.
  public class Outer {
    // stuff
    public static class Inner {
      // other stuff
    }
  }

Just supporting this behaviour would be good enough, except
sometimes (rarely), Inner references some static fields or members
of Outer.  In which case, precondition checking would have to
verify that they are visible from the new location, and the refactoring
would expand the scoped references as needed for the new context.