Memory Usage in Java

[Alex Buckley]

On 8/8/2025 9:47 AM, Remi Forax wrote:
> C (and Java) tricks you to think that a "short" has a single 
> representation but this is not true,
> it has two representations, one on stack (local variables) and one on 
> heap (fields and array elements).
...
> That's why in Java, the result of the addition of two shorts is an int,
>    short s = ...
>    short s2 = ...
>    s + s2. // this is an int

The reason why the result of adding two shorts is an int is _because the 
JLS says so_. The physical representation of short values on the stack 
and on the heap -- whether in 1995 or 2025 -- is immaterial to the 
strongly typed result of a numeric operator.

You could ask _why_ the JLS promotes each short to int before performing 
the addition, then adds two ints producing an int. The answer is that 
preferring to operate on 32-bit values made sense in 1995 and is still 
acceptable today.

Alex