A Closer Look at Literals

A Closer Look at Literals

 

Literals were mentioned briefly in Previous Posts. Now that the built-in types have been formally described, let’s take a closer look at them.

 

Integer Literals

Integers are probably the most commonly used type in the typical program. Any whole number value is an integer literal. Examples are 1, 2, 3, and 42. These are all decimal values, meaning they are describing a base 10 number. There are two other bases which can be used in integer literals, octal (base eight) and hexadecimal (base 16). Octal values are denoted in Java by a leading zero. Normal decimal numbers cannot have a leading zero.

 

Thus, the seemingly valid value 09 will produce an error from the compiler, since 9 is outside of octal’s 0 to 7 range. A more common base for numbers used by programmers is hexadecimal, which matches cleanly with modulo 8 word sizes, such as 8, 16, 32, and 64 bits. You signify a hexadecimal constant with a leading zero-x, (0x or 0X). The range of a hexadecimal digit is 0 to 15, so A through F (or a through f ) are substituted for 10 through 15. Integer literals create an int value, which in Java is a 32-bit integer value.

 

Since Java is strongly typed, you might be wondering how it is possible to assign an integer literal to one of Java’s other integer types, such as byte or long, without causing a type mismatch error. Fortunately, such situations are easily handled. When a literal value is assigned to a byte or short variable, no error is generated if the literal value is within the range of the target type. Also, an integer literal can always be assigned to a long variable.

 

However, to specify a long literal, you will need to explicitly tell the compiler that the literal value is of type long. You do this by appending an upper- or lowercase L to the literal. For example, 0x7ffffffffffffffL or 9223372036854775807L is the largest long.

 

Floating-Point Literals

Floating-point numbers represent decimal values with a fractional component. They can be expressed in either standard or scientific notation. Standard notation consists of a whole number component followed by a decimal point followed by a fractional component. For example, 2.0, 3.14159, and 0.6667 represent valid standard-notation floating-point numbers. Scientific notation uses a standard-notation, floating-point number plus a suffix that specifies a power of 10 by which the number is to be multiplied. The exponent is indicated by an E or e followed by a decimal number, which can be positive or negative. Examples include 6.022E23, 314159E–05, and 2e+100.

 

Floating-point literals in Java default to double precision. To specify a float literal,

you must append an F or f to the constant. You can also explicitly specify a double literal by appending a D or d. Doing so is, of course, redundant. The default double type consumes 64 bits of storage, while the less-accurate float type requires only 32 bits.

 

Boolean Literals

Boolean literals are simple. There are only two logical values that a boolean value can have, true and false. The values of true and false do not convert into any numerical representation. The true literal in Java does not equal 1, nor does the false literal equal 0. In Java, they can only be assigned to variables declared as boolean, or used in expressions with Boolean operators.

 

Character Literals

Characters in Java are indices into the Unicode character set. They are 16-bit values that can be converted into integers and manipulated with the integer operators, such as the addition and subtraction operators. A literal character is represented inside a pair of single quotes. All of the visible ASCII characters can be directly entered inside the quotes, such as ‘a’, ‘z’, and ‘@’. For characters that are impossible to enter directly, there are several escape sequences, which allow you to enter the character you need, such as ‘\’’ for the single-quote character itself, and ‘\n’ for the newline character. There is also a mechanism for directly entering the value of a character in octal or hexadecimal. For octal notation use the backslash followed by the three-digit number. For example, ‘\141’ is the letter ‘a’.

 

For hexadecimal, you enter a backslash-u (\u), then exactly four hexadecimal digits. For example, ‘\u0061’ is the ISO-Latin-1 ‘a’ because the top byte is zero. ‘\ua432’ is a Japanese Katakana character. Table 3-1 shows the character escape sequences.