Literals

Literals
An Introduction with Examples in Java

Prof. David Bernstein
James Madison University

Computer Science Department

bernstdh@jmu.edu

Review

Literals

Some Literals in Java

Numeric Literals

Grouping Character:
- You can't use a comma (US-style) or dot (European-style) as a grouping character (e.g., 100,000 is not a valid int literal) but you can use an underscore (e.g., 100_100 is a valid int literal)
Integer vs. Floating Point:
- A numeric literal without a dot is always an integer number
- A numeric literal with a single dot is always a floating point number even if there are no digits to the right (e.g., 1. is a double literal)

Character Literals

Most Character Literals:
- Consist of a single symbol enclosed in single quotes (e.g., 'a', '7', '[')
A Consequence:
- The single quote literal must be represented in a special way, using what is called an escape sequence, which, in many languages, is a symbol preceded by a backslash (e.g., '\'')
A Cascading Consequence:
- The backslash literal must also be escaped (i.e., '\\')
Other Escaped Character Literals:
- '\t' is the tab literal
- '\n' is the newline literal
- '\r' is the carriage return literal
- '\"' is the double quote literal (the need for which will become apparent later)