Introduction to Programming

Narrowing

The narrowing conversion of numeric primitive types occurs in the opposite direction—from the wider type to the narrower one—and typically requires casting. The Java specification identifies 22 narrowing primitive conversions:

• short to byte or char
• char to byte or short
• int to byte, short, or char
• long to byte, short, char, or int
• float to byte, short, char, int, or long
• double to byte, short, char, int, long, or float

It can result in a loss of magnitude of the value and possibly in loss of precision too. The narrowing procedure is more complicated than the widening one and discussion of it is beyond the scope of an introductory course. The least one can do is to make sure that the original value is smaller than the maximum value ...