Defined constants like C?

Question

I'm working on an app that configures external instruments by reading and writing their registers. Each register can be 1 of 3 types, 16 bit integers (signed or unsigned), 32 bit integers (signed or unsigned) or 32 bit IEEE floating point. I thought that I would approach this by having 2 variables for each register to hold values, a long for integer values, and a float for floating point, and a 3rd variable to hold the type for the variable.
In C I would probably have defined some constants with the preprocessor to make this easier and more readable:
#define INT16     0
#define INT32     1
#define FLT32     2Then in the code I could use switch statements or comparisons to the above constants in a very readable way ei:
if (Reg.Type == INT32) {
    // handle Int 32 types here
}What's the "right" approach in Java?

Answer 1

static final int INT16 = 0;
static final int INT32 = 1;
static final int FLT32 = 2;I was informed by Java gurus that declaring variables as static final is equivalent to C constants inasmuch asstatic final int INT16 = 0;
if (INT16 == 0) System.out.println("INT16 = 0");is equivalent to (i.e. generates the same bytecode as):System.out.println("INT16 = 0");Doug