Java, A Beginner's Guide, 5th Edition, 5th Edition

Literals

In Java, literals refer to fixed values that are represented in their human-readable form. For example, the number 100 is a literal. Literals are also commonly called constants. For the most part, literals, and their usage, are so intuitive that they have been used in one form or another by all the preceding sample programs. Now the time has come to explain them formally.

Java literals can be of any of the primitive data types. The way each literal is represented depends upon its type. As explained earlier, character constants are enclosed in single quotes. For example, ‘a’ and ‘%’ are both character constants.

Integer literals are specified as numbers without fractional components. For example, 10 and –100 are integer literals. Floating-point ...