(Thought question: ) Why does readUnsignedByte() return an int and not a byte?

A good answer might be:

In order to return values that can't be represented in datatype byte.

An unsigned integer is zero or postive. In Java (regardless of computer platform) primitive type byte holds an integer in the range -128 to +127. An unsigned byte holds values 0 to +255, so something larger than datatype byte is needed. Datatype int is returned because it is used more often than the other integer types.

Most methods of DataInputStream throw an EOFException when the end of a file is reached. Let us work on a program that uses this idea to read integers until end of file. The loop of the program looks like this:

      try
      {
        while ( true )
          sum += instr.readInt();
      }

      catch ( EOFException  eof )
      {
        System.out.println( "The sum is: " + sum );
        instr.close();
      }

The while loop keeps going until readInt() hits the end of the file. Then it throws an exception and execution jumps out of the loop to the catch{} statement.

QUESTION 8:

Will catch ( EOFException eof ) catch an IOException that is not an EOFException?