Question

According to the Java standard the short and char types both use 2 bytes so when I code something like:

char ch = 'c';
short s = ch;

There is an error saying “possible loss of precision”. What am I missing here?

Answer 1

char is unsigned, short is signed.

So while they are both 2-byte long, they use the sixteenth bit for different purposes.

The range of the char type is 0 to 2^16 – 1 (0 to 65535).

The short range is -2^15 to 2^15 – 1 (−32,768 to 32,767).