assignments and casting

[d jones]

Hi,

Could anybody please guide me in the direction to a good site explaining casting and assignments.

For example:

Why is this legal:
short x = 7;

But....

if we have a method

testMethod(short param){}

and we call the method as follows:
testMethod(7);

This call to the method is illegal because we first of all have to cast the literal 7 to a short. Yet we can assign the literal 7 to a short variable.

I don't fully understand this.

Many Thanks

[Keith Lynn]

Your question involves two different types of conversions, assignment conversion and method invocation conversion.

Assignment conversion includes what are called narrowing primitive conversions. Basically if the type of the variable on the left is a byte, char, or short, and the type on the right of the assigment statement is a compile-time constant of type byte, char, short, or int that is within the range of the variable on the left, then a narrowing primitive conversion will be performed.

Method invocation conversion does not contain the narrowing primitive conversions.

[wise owen]

Assignment Conversion vs. Method Invocation Conversion

[Aum Tao]

Thanks.