posted 21 years ago
From JLS 5.2:
In addition, a narrowing primitive conversion may be used if all of the following conditions are satisfied:
* The expression is a constant expression of type byte, short, char or int.
* The type of the variable is byte, short, or char.
* The value of the expression (which is known at compile time, because it is a constant expression) is representable in the type of the variable.