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THE Java™ Programming Language, Fourth Edition
book

THE Java™ Programming Language, Fourth Edition

by Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes
August 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
928 pages
20h 39m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from THE Java™ Programming Language, Fourth Edition

Chapter 8. Primitives as Types

 

I'm gonna wrap myself in paper, I'm gonna dab myself with glue, Stick some stamps on top of my head! I'm gonna mail myself to you.

 
 --Woody Guthrie, Mail Myself to You

The separation of primitive types (byte, float, and so on) and reference types (classes and interfaces) is a trade-off between efficiency and familiarity versus expressiveness and consistency. An object may incur too much overhead where a plain int will do, while an int may be fast and convenient until you need to store it into a hashtable. To smooth this separation, the Java programming language provides a wrapper class corresponding to each of the primitive types. Instances of a given wrapper class contain a value of the corresponding primitive type. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0321349806Purchase book