The reason it does this is that Character.MAX_VALUE is a char, so it gets turned into a single-character
String rather than formatted as 65535. Since you don't have a font that supports the 0xFF00 code page (code point?), it uses the "I don't know what this character is" character: "?".
Another way to view this value as a number, rather than applying math to the number, is to cast it to an int directly.
[ January 27, 2005: Message edited by: David Harkness ]