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Java is an object-oriented programming language, but there's more to Java than programming with objects. This first article in the Java 101: Foundations mini-series on elementary language features introduces some of the non-object-oriented features and syntax that are fundamentals of the Java language. Find out why Unicode has replaced ASCII as the universal encoding standard for Java, then learn how to use comments, identifiers, types, literals, and variables in your Java programs.

Note that examples in this article were written using Java 8.

Unicode and character encoding

When you save a program's source code (typically in a text file), the characters are encoded for storage. Historically, ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was used to encode these characters. Because ASCII is limited to the English language, Unicode was developed as a replacement.

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