Java Syntax from the Ground Up - Java in a Nutshell - page 28

Because the Java floating-point types can handle overflow to infinity and underflow
to zero and have a special NaN value, floating-point arithmetic never throws excep‐
tions, even when performing illegal operations, like dividing zero by zero or taking
the square root of a negative number.
The float and double primitive types have corresponding classes, named Float
and Double . Each of these classes defines the following useful constants: MIN_VALUE ,
MAX_VALUE , NEGATIVE_INFINITY , POSITIVE_INFINITY , and NaN .
The infinite floating-point values behave as you would expect. Adding or subtract‐
ing any finite value to or from infinity, for example, yields infinity. Negative zero
behaves almost identically to positive zero, and, in fact, the == equality operator
reports that negative zero is equal to positive zero. One way to distinguish negative
zero from positive, or regular, zero is to divide by it: 1.0/0.0 yields positive infinity,
but 1.0 divided by negative zero yields negative infinity. Finally, because NaN is Not-
a-number, the == operator says that it is not equal to any other number, including
itself ! To check whether a float or double value is NaN, you must use the
Float.isNaN() and Double.isNaN() methods.
Primitive Type Conversions
Java allows conversions between integer values and floating-point values. In addi‐
tion, because every character corresponds to a number in the Unicode encoding,
char values can be converted to and from the integer and floating-point types. In
fact, boolean is the only primitive type that cannot be converted to or from another
primitive type in Java.
There are two basic types of conversions. A widening conversion occurs when a
value of one type is converted to a wider type—one that has a larger range of legal
values. For example, Java performs widening conversions automatically when you
assign an int literal to a double variable or a char literal to an int variable.
Narrowing conversions are another matter, however. A narrowing conversion occurs
when a value is converted to a type that is not wider than it is. Narrowing conver‐
sions are not always safe: it is reasonable to convert the integer value 13 to a byte ,
for example, but it is not reasonable to convert 13,000 to a byte , because byte can
hold only numbers between -128 and 127. Because you can lose data in a narrowing
conversion, the Java compiler complains when you attempt any narrowing conver‐
sion, even if the value being converted would in fact fit in the narrower range of the
specified type:
int i = 13 ;
byte b = i ; // The compiler does not allow this
The one exception to this rule is that you can assign an integer literal (an int value)
to a byte or short variable if the literal falls within the range of the variable.
If you need to perform a narrowing conversion and are confident you can do so
without losing data or precision, you can force Java to perform the conversion using