Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Section 6.7 Argument Promotion and Casting

• Argument promotion (p. 210) converts an argument’s value to the type that the method expects to receive in its corresponding parameter.

• Promotion rules (p. 210) apply to expressions containing values of two or more primitive types and to primitive-type values passed as arguments to methods. Each value is promoted to the “highest” type in the expression. In cases where information may be lost due to conversion, the Java compiler requires you to use a cast operator to explicitly force the conversion to occur.