5.1.2 Widening Primitive Conversions

The following 19 specific conversions on primitive types are called the widening primitive conversions:

• byte to short, int, long, float, or double
• short to int, long, float, or double
• char to int, long, float, or double
• int to long, float, or double
• long to float or double
• float to double

Widening primitive conversions do not lose information about the overall magnitude of a numeric value. Indeed, conversions widening from an integral type to another integral type and from float to double do not lose any information at all; the numeric value is preserved exactly. Conversion of an int or a long value to float, or of a long value to double, may result in loss of precision-that is, the result may lose some of the least significant bits of the value. In this case, the resulting floating-point value will be a correctly rounded version of the integer value, using IEEE 754 round-to-nearest mode (§4.2.4).

A widening conversion of a signed integer value to an integral type T simply sign-extends the two's-complement representation of the integer value to fill the wider format. A widening conversion of a character to an integral type T zero-extends the representation of the character value to fill the wider format.

Despite the fact that loss of precision may occur, widening conversions among primitive types never result in a run-time exception (§11).

Here is an example of a widening conversion that loses precision:

class Test {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		int big = 1234567890;
		float approx = big;
		System.out.println(big - (int)approx);
	}
}

which prints:

-46

thus indicating that information was lost during the conversion from type int to type float because values of type float are not precise to nine significant digits.