assigns a data-type to a variable. As you can see in the following var examples, the left-hand side of the assignment does not reference a Java types such as long, double or ArrayList. Instead, it ...

If all of the values fall within the range of a float, it makes sense to use the smaller Java data type in this situation, otherwise the array elements needlessly consume memory.

Listing 3. Excerpts from the meta-file that specifies the Java data types of various elements declared in the keplerian_elements.dtd file.