Ivor Horton's Beginning Java™ 2, JDK™ 5th Edition

2.6. Mixed Arithmetic Expressions

You have probably guessed from earlier discussions that you can mix values of the basic types together in a single expression. The way mixed expressions are treated is governed by some simple rules that apply to each operator in such an expression. The rules, in the sequence in which they are checked, are:

• If either operand is of type double, the other is converted to double before the operation is carried out.

• If either operand is of type float, the other is converted to float before the operation is carried out.

• If either operand is of type long, the other is converted to long before the operation is carried out.

The first rule in the sequence that applies to a given operation is the one that is carried out. If neither operand is double, float, or long, they must be int, short, or byte, so they will be converted to type int where necessary and use 32-bit arithmetic to produce the result, as we saw earlier in the chapter.

2.6.1. Explicit Casting

It may well be that the default treatment of mixed expressions listed in the preceding section is not what you want. For example, suppose you have defined a double variable result; and two variables, three and two, of type int with the values 3 and 2, respectively. If you compute the value of result with the statement

result = 1.5 + three/two;

the value stored will be 2.5, since three/two will be executed as an integer operation and will produce the result 1. You may have wanted the term three/two to produce ...