JAva help, need to understand

[nuzzle]

I need to understand why this is giving me the result of 220

Due to implicit conversion the chars are converted to their Unicode numbers which are 'D'=68, 'E'=69 and 'S'=83. The sum is 220.

To get the wanted conversion you can give the compiler a hint to nudge it in the right direction, like

System.out.println("" + first + middle + last );

Now the compiler will interpret the + operators involved to mean String concatenation rather than integer addition. So the problem was that + is overloaded for both integers and String and you didn't get the implicit conversions you expected. To be very explicit about it you can do,

System.out.println(Character.toString(first) + Character.toString((middle) + Character.toString(last));

Now there's no doubt but it's kind of tedious so most people rely on implicit conversion with enougth information to make the compiler do the right thing.