Rafael Bracho writes:

Returning of Numeric Constants. There seems to be a weird
interaction between attempting to return a numeric constant,
especially zero, as a result of the ternary operator, when the
function is declared as returning a 'short' or a 'byte'. The
following class makes oakc warn us of a possible loss of precision:

    class test {
short handicap() {
short hcp = (short) (0.9 * (200.0 - average()));
return (hcp > 0) ? hcp : 0;
}
    }

Casting zero to be a short in the return statement stops the warning.