Non-Numerical Literals

Non-Numerical Literals

There are two major non-numerical literals in Java. The first, a character literal, represents a single character surrounded by quotations. Some characters are not so obvious or simply cannot be encased in quotations. That is where character escapes come in. The following post is a list of commonly used escape characters to print the not-so –obvious values:

Literals Notes 2

Literals Notes 2

Floating-point types also let you specify scientific notation by using the letter e or (E) to represent the exponential power. For example, the value 2.54 x 10 power 5 represented in Java is 2.54e5 or 2.54e5f housed in the float type.

Unlike C and C ++, Java has Booleans literals, Java Booleans represent either the non-numerical value true or false.

Literals Notes

Appended letters for specifying a particular data type when using literals are not case sensitive. For example, 100001 and 10000L both specify this literal to be a numerical type long. Extremely large values utilize the integer data type long. Floating-point values are automatically assumed to be a type double. However if you wish to use the smaller floating-point type float, then you need to append a letter “f” to represent that data type 2.313f.

Numerical Literals

In Java programs, numerical literals represent quantitative values, Java supports several different numerical systems, including octal (a numbering system with a base of 8) and hexadecimal (using a base of 16). If needed, you can specify the literal to be long by appending the letter “L”: 24050000L. An int is the default type used for integer literals.

Literal 2

Literal 2

Data types, discussed later in the chapter are values (a.k.a variables) that represent or hold other values. This is very similar to algebra, where x can be more than just x; x could be 2, square root of -5, or the gross national product. As you will learn later, Java has a specific set of data types for certain values.

Literal

Literal

A literal is any value expressed as itself. There are several types of literals; numerical literals, including integers, floating-point values, and Booleans; and non-numerical literals, including characters and multiple literals (known as string literals).

Getting A First Sip In Java

For a moment, let’s leave the theoretical world behind and get our hands dirty with Visual J++ by creating a very simple Java program in Visual J++.

To create any program in Visual J++, follow these 3 simple steps:

Write the program. (Later on you will learn tips and tricks to let Visual J++ write parts of your programs for you.)
Compile or build the code into an executable format.
Execute program.