how to write one method for more than one types of primitives

[Josh Abraham]

Hi Guys,

Suppose I have a method which prototype is

int myMethod (int a, int b)

.
As you probably, understand, the method gets two integers and returns an int.

If I want to make this method work on two floats (and returns a float), I understand that I'll have to copy paste the implementation of the previous method and change 'int' to 'float'.
My question is: "Is there a way to write only one method that can be valid for both integeres and floats?".

[Campbell Ritchie]

Depends what you want it to return. Don't create a method for floats. Don't use floats. If you really have to use floating‑point arithmetic use doubles.

If you create a method which takes two doubles it can return a double. You can pass ints and they will undergo widening conversion (sometimes called implicit casting) to doubles. But the method will return a double. You can cast that to an int but you may find you are outwith the range of an int and you get an extreme value, as described in the Java® Language Specification, but that bit is not easy to understand. Simply you might find you are rounded to 0 or Integer.MAX_VALUE or Integer.MIN_VALUE.

As they say in London, “You pays yer money and you takes yer choice.”