You can't.

Well, you can if you want to push your Java source though a pre-processor of
some kind which globablly replaces "my_type" with "int", but that's your only
option.

   -- chris

As you've learned, you can't do this the same way in Java, but you might
look at Java 'generics' - they can [he thinks, without actually trying
it himself] provide a similar, though not identical functionality.
Of course, this will likely have to be done using the Integer, Double, Long,
etc. classes instead of the primitives.  This may or may not be suitable to
your needs.

(In some ways, Java's approach is superior to C's [heh, couldn't resist]
in that you can use the same method definition to work with 'Integer' in one
place in your program while simultaneously working with 'Double' in another.)

We did catch your meaning.

Like the others have said - there is no way to do this.

There is no way, because its not something you need nor want to do in a
platform independent language like Java.  Distributing Java code that
used a short, int or long would for most JVMs make no actual difference.

Whilst the JVM Spec talks about Integral Type ranges:

"3.2.1 Integral Types and Values
The values of the integral types of the Java Virtual Machine are the
same as those for the integral types of the Java language (§2.4.1):

    * For byte, from -128 to 127 (-27 to 27-1), inclusive
    * For short, from -32768 to 32767 (-215 to 215-1), inclusive
    * For int, from -2147483648 to 2147483647 (-231 to 231-1), inclusive
    * For long, from -9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807 (-263
to 263-1), inclusive
    * For char, from 'u0000' to 'uffff'; char is unsigned, so 'uffff'
represents 65535 when used in expressions, not -1  "

It does NOT talk about their storage.

"3.4 Words
No mention has been made of the storage requirements for values of the
various Java Virtual Machine types, only the ranges those values may
take. The Java Virtual Machine does not mandate the size of its data
types. Instead, the Java Virtual Machine defines an abstract notion of a
word that has a platform-specific size. A word is large enough to hold a
value of type byte, char, short, int, float, reference, or
returnAddress, or to hold a native pointer. Two words are large enough
to hold values of the larger types, long and double. Java's runtime data
areas are all defined in terms of these abstract words.

A word is usually the size of a pointer on the host platform. On a
32-bit platform, a word is 32 bits, pointers are 32 bits, and longs and
doubles naturally take up two words. A naive 64-bit implementation of
the Java Virtual Machine may waste half of a word used to store a 32-bit
datum, but may also be able to store all of a long or a double in one of
the two words allotted to it.

The choice of a specific word size, although platform-specific, is made
at the implementation level, not as part of the Java Virtual Machine's
design. It is not visible outside the implementation or to code compiled
for the Java Virtual Machine."

you can't. The closest you can come is a Wrapper class with an int,
double etc inside.