What is the primary purpose of casting in Java?

The primary purpose of casting in Java is to convert objects from one type to another. When dealing with inheritance and polymorphism, casting allows you to treat an object of one class as an object of another class. This is especially common in scenarios involving parent and child classes where a reference of a parent class can point to an object of a child class.

For instance, if you have a class hierarchy where Animal is a parent class and Dog is a subclass, you can store a Dog object in an Animal type variable. If you need to access methods specific to Dog, you would use casting to instruct the Java compiler to treat the Animal reference as a Dog reference. This conversion is essential for accessing subclass-specific functionality while retaining the flexibility of the parent class reference.

Other options do not essentially capture the main role of casting. Creating new instances pertains to object creation rather than type conversion. Verifying object types can be handled by the instanceof operator, but that's a separate concern from the act of casting itself. Enhancing performance of methods is not a direct purpose of casting; while casting can have an impact on performance indirectly, its core function lies in type conversion.