java byte data type

Question

In Sun\' tutorial it says about a byte:

byte: The byte data type is an 8-bit signed two\'s complement integer. It has a minimum value of -128 and a ma

Answer 1

It saves memory by consuming only eight bits of storage, versus 32 for integers. The size of arrays is directly proportional to the size of the contained datatype; an array of integers will consume about four times more memory (handwaves) than an array of bytes.

From Wikipedia:

A two's-complement system or two's-complement arithmetic is a system in which negative numbers are represented by the two's complement of the absolute value;1 this system is the most common method of representing signed integers on computers.[2] In such a system, a number is negated (converted from positive to negative or vice versa) by computing its two's complement. An N-bit two's-complement numeral system can represent every integer in the range −2^(N−1) to +2^(N−1)−1.