Question

If you declare variables of type byte or short and attempt to perform arithmetic operations on these, you receive the error ‘Type mismatch: cannot convert int to short’ (or correspondingly ‘Type mismatch: cannot convert int to byte’).

byte a = 23; byte b = 34; byte c = a + b; 

In this example, the compile error is on the third line.

Answer 1

Although the arithmetic operators are defined to operate on any numeric type, according the Java language specification (5.6.2 Binary Numeric Promotion), operands of type byte and short are automatically promoted to int before being handed to the operators.

To perform arithmetic operations on variables of type byte or short, you must enclose the expression in parentheses (inside of which operations will be carried out as type int), and then cast the result back to the desired type.

byte a = 23; byte b = 34; byte c = (byte) (a + b);

Here’s a follow-on question to the real Java gurus: why? The types byte and short are perfectly fine numeric types. Why does Java not allow direct arithmetic operations on these types? (The answer is not ‘loss of precision’, as there is no apparent reason to convert to int in the first place.)

Update: jrudolph suggests that this behavior is based on the operations available in the JVM, specifically, that only full- and double-word operators are implemented. Hence, to operator on bytes and shorts, they must be converted to int.