This is interesting. I ran this code on the system in front of me, an UltraSPARC 10/Solaris 8 running JDK 1.2.1_04c, and got exactly the same result you did.
I don't have an explanation just yet -- I don't dabble in the numeric types as much as I should -- but I think we can rule out platform-specific issues or some kind of initialization problem.
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Michael Ernest, co-author of:
The Complete Java 2 Certification Study Guide
[This message has been edited by Michael Ernest (edited December 22, 2000).]