Chapter 3. Operators and Assignments

Exam Objectives

• Determine the result of applying any operator (including assignment operators and the instanceof operator) to operands of any type, class, scope, or accessibility, or any combination of these.

  • See also Section 6.6 .

• Determine the result of applying the boolean equals(Object) method to objects of any combination of the classes java.lang.String , java.lang.Boolean and java.lang.Object .

• In an expression involving the operators & , , && , , and variables of known values, state which operands are evaluated and the value of the expression.

• Determine the effect on objects and primitive values of passing variables into methods and performing assignments or other modifying operations in that method.

Supplementary Objectives

• Understand the operator precedence and associativity rules.

• Distinguish between conversions involving casting, widening numeric conversions, and narrowing numeric conversions.

• State unary numeric promotion and binary numeric promotion rules and the contexts in which they are applied.

• Understand type conversions for primitive data types on assignment, string concatenation, arithmetic expression evaluation, and method invocation.