Parentheses around data type?

Question

I am a beginning programmer and came across this in my textbook:

public boolean equals(DataElement otherElement)
{
    IntElement temp = (IntElement) otherEl         


        

Answer 1

The purpose of (IntElement) after temp is performing a type conversion, more technically, a cast, where you're saying that otherElement, which is a parameter of type DataElement, should be taken as an object of the more concrete type IntElement.