Have a look at the precedence table for Java: http://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/11precedence/ http://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/11precedence/ The cast has higher p

Have a look at the precedence table for Java: http://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/11precedence/ http://introcs.cs.princeton.edu/11precedence/ The cast has higher precedence than multiplication, so the scaling doesn't help at all, unless you use parenthesis to force the right order of evaluation.