Type Casting

While writing programs in Java, you will often need to change an int type variable to a double type variable or vice versa. There are also some operations that implicitly interconvert types. For example, the division of an int type variable with a double type variable. Let’s look at this case first.

Implicit type casting

In the basic cases, i.e., the division of similar type variables, the data type of the result remains preserved. This means that:

• The division of two int type variables results in another int type variable with the decimal dropped: 7/2 = 3
• The division of two double type variables results in another double type variable: 7.0/2.0 = 3.5

However, if the variables have different types, i.e., one variable is int type and the other is double type, the resulting variable is of double type, and the decimal part is retained. The lower data type int (having smaller size) is converted into the higher data type double (having larger size).