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

jmein is correct, it tells the compiler/interpreter to turn the one variable type into another. In reality it is just telling the processor to treat it as another type. In C this is a blessing and a curse, in java, what looks like you are writing, you MUST cast the variable to treat it differently.