Another Ques from abhilash's site

[Chaitali Deshpande]

Question 27.
public class ADirtyOne
{
char a = '\u000A';
}
An attempt to compile the above class
1) will complete successfully.
2)will not compile as 0x000A is out of range for unicode charaters.
3)will complain about illegal character assignment
4) will compile but will cause a runtime error in accessing the variable.
Ans 3
Can someone please explain why 3?
Thanks in advance

[greg philpott]

The answer is 3 because
the literal you are assigning to your char has the form of a Unicode escape sequence
ie. \uxxxx
And these x's must be hexadecimal digits.

[Chaitali Deshpande]

greg
I think A is a hexadecimal digit

[greg philpott]

sorry, you're right A is a Hexidecimal digit.
Here is the correct answer:
http://www.artima.com/java/answers/Nov2000/messages/66.html
basically the first thing the compiler does is convert all unicode escape characters first and as \u000a is the character for linefeed, your code turns into this:
char a = '
';
which gives you the compile error
That definitely is a dirty one!
[This message has been edited by greg philpott (edited February 22, 2001).]