char and int in Java

I was surprised to see this code work. I thought that char and int were two distinct data types in Java and that I would have had to cast the char to an int for this to give the ascii equivelent. Why does this work?

String s = "hello";
int x = s.charAt(1);
System.out.println(x);

A char can be automatically converted to an int. See JLS 5.1.2:

The following 19 specific conversions on primitive types are called the widening primitive conversions:

...

• char to int, long, float, or double

...

A widening conversion of a signed integer value to an integral type T simply sign-extends the two's-complement representation of the integer value to fill the wider format. A widening conversion of a char to an integral type T zero-extends the representation of the char value to fill the wider format.

(emphasis added)

char and int are two distinct types, but this works because an int has more precision than a char. That is, every value of char can be represented as an int so no data is lost in the cast.