Introduction to Programming

Default values of primitive types

After a variable is declared and before it can be used, a value has to be assigned to it. As we have mentioned in the Variable declaration, definition, and initialization section, a local variable must be initialized or assigned a value explicitly. For example:

int x;int y = 0;x = 1;

But if the variable is declared as a class field (static), an instance (non-static) property, or an array component and is not initialized explicitly, it is initialized automatically with a default value. The value itself depends on the type of the variable: 

• For the byte,  short, int, and long types, the default value is zero, 0
• For the float and double types, the default value is positive zero, 0.0
• For the char type, the default ...