Not so primitive primitives

[Andry Dub]

Why this is OK:

byte c = 'k';

But this is compiler error:

char l = 'k';
byte c = l;

[Peter Heide]

A character has size 2 Bytes. A byte has size 1 Byte.

The compilier does not let you copy a character to a byte because of the possible loss of information.

You can force the compiler to do it for you by using the following cast, but then you as the programmer are responsible for eventuelly loss of information:

byte c = (byte) l;

I think it is not considered as good style to use character to store numbers, personally I would prefer something like int.

[Deepak Jain]

I think the qusetion here is why is the below code that assigns a character literal to byte not flashing a compiler error
byte c = 'k';
Where as
char c1 = 'k'
byte c = c1;
shows a compiler error.
Thanks
Deepak

[Henry Wong]

Originally posted by Deepak Jain:
I think the qusetion here is why is the below code that assigns a character literal to byte not flashing a compiler error
byte c = 'k';
Where as
char c1 = 'k'
byte c = c1;
shows a compiler error.
Thanks
Deepak

That is because the compiler knows that the value of 'k' will fit into a byte without any lost of precision. In the second case, it doesn't know that the char value held in "c1" will fit into a byte -- as c1 is not a compile time constant.

Henry

[Andry Dub]

Thank you!
I didn't know this nuance.