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Thread: Literals: What's the point?

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    Default Literals: What's the point?

    So, I just came upon the concept of "literals," and I'm not getting it. Apparently it's the "source code representation of a primitive data type." In other words, the number you typed in the program. I won't ask why that even needs a name; here's what I'm not getting:

    It says that you can make a number be a long-type, for instance, by adding an L after it. So 30000 is an int, 30000L is a long.

    But if you're declaring a variable, you can already type "long x = 30000." Why would you need the extra letter? Even if you're feeding a truly long number to the program through input, you would have to feed it to a long-type field if it were too big to fit in an int. So why is the L ever needed at all?

    As a matter of fact, if I type "long x = <really big number>" into my IDE, it gives me an error that the "integer value" (even though I just declared it as a long) is too big, until I append an L to the end. And if I declare a huge number appended with L to an int var, it tells me "possible loss of precision" (nevermind the fact that it should be too big for an int var anyway, which it only spits at me if I drop the ending L).

    I know this has to be a stupid question, I can feel it - the answer is going to be very de-mystifying I'm sure, but right now, I don't get the point of all this.

    Thanks a lot,
    -summit45


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    Default Re: Literals: What's the point?

    Literals aren't limited to only numbers. They can be booleans, characters, strings, numbers, null, etc. (not a complete list).

    They're called literals because they represent an absolute value which cannot be interpreted as anything other else. We call them literals because we need a name to refer to what these things are.

    There is a big difference between these:

    int val = '4'; // not actually the integer literal 4, but the character literal '4' which in ASCII is equivalent to 52
    int val2 = 4; // this is the integer literal 4
    int val3 = (int) 4f; // this is the floating point literal 4f. Because floats are not implicitly castable to int, we must explicitly cast it.
    // ...

    There are complicated reasons (some of which is historical) why integer literals and long literals are treated differently, and I won't pretend to know/understand all of it. My guess is that it has something to do with implementation details of the compiler (especially on older 32-bit systems), and possibly has historical reasons coming from C/C++ where ints originally held 16-bit values and longs held 32-bit values.

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