I’m preparing the OCAJP: Oracle Certified Associate Java SE 8 Programmer. Here’re something interesting that I learned from the study guide, chapter 1 and chapter 2. They’re rarely used in our daily mission, but I just wrote them down for fun.

Numeric Literals

Numeric literals is a feature added in Java 7. You can have underscores in numbers to make them easier to read. You can add underscores anywhere except at the beginning of a literal, the end of a literal, right before a decimal, or right after a decimal point.

int million1 = 1000000;
int million2 = 1_000_000;

Numeric Promotion

Java may do things that seem unusual to you. In numeric promotion, for example, smaller data types, namely byte, short, and char, are first promoted to int any time they’re used with a Java binary arithmetic operator, even if neither of the operands is int.

short x = 10;
short y = 3;
short z = x * y;  // does not compile!
int z = x * y;    // ok: x and y are promoted to int

Optional Label Parameter

The optional label parameter allows us to break out of a higher level outer loop. For example:

    if (i * j == 8) {
      break PARENT_LOOP;

Implicit Casting in Compound Assignment Operators

Besides the simple assignment operator =, there’re also numerous compound assignment operators, e.g. += and -=. Compound operators are useful for more than just shorthand—they can also save us from having to explicitly cast a value. For example, consider the following example, in which the last line will not compile due to the result being promoted to a long and assigned to an int variable. This could be fixed using the compound assignment operator.

// compound assignment operator
int a = 0;
a += 1;

// implicit casting
long x = 10;
int y = 5;
y = y * x; // does not compile!
y *= x;    // ok

Precedence of Importing

Given the following classes, which of the following snippets can be inserted in place of INSERT IMPORTS HERE and have the code compile? (Choose all that apply)

package aquarium;
public class Water {
  boolean salty = false;

package aquarium.jellies;
public class Water {
  boolea salty = true;

package employee;
public class WaterFiller {
  Water water;
  1. import aquarium.*;
  2. import aquarium.Water; import aquarium.jellies.*;
  3. import aquarium.*; import aquarium.jellies.Water;
  4. import aquarium.*; import aquarium.jellies.*;
  5. import aquarium.Water; import aquarium.jellies.Water;
  6. None of these imports can make the code compile.

The answer is 123. Option 1 is correct because it imports all the classes in the aquarium package including aquarium.Water. Option 2 and 3 are correct because they import Water by classname. Since importing by classname takes precedence over wildcards, these compile.