Saturday 7 July 2012

Item 48: Avoid float and double if exact answers are required


The float and double types are particularly illsuited for monetary calculations because it is impossible to represent 0.1 (or any other negative power of ten) as a float or double exactly. For example, suppose you have $1.03 in your pocket, and you spend 42¢. How much money do you have left? Here’s a naive program fragment that attempts to answer this question:

System.out.println(1.03 - .42);

Unfortunately, it prints out 0.6100000000000001. This is not an isolated case. Suppose you have a dollar in your pocket, and you buy nine washers priced at ten cents each. How much change do you get?

System.out.println(1.00 - 9 * .10);

According to this program fragment, you get $0.09999999999999998.

You might think that the problem could be solved merely by rounding results prior to printing, but unfortunately this does not always work.

The right way to solve this problem is to use BigDecimal, int, or long for monetary calculations.

There are, however, two disadvantages to using BigDecimal: it’s less convenient than using a primitive arithmetic type, and it’s slower. The latter disadvantage is irrelevant if you’re solving a single short problem, but the former may annoy you.

An alternative to using BigDecimal is to use int or long, depending on the amounts involved, and to keep track of the decimal point yourself.

In summary, don’t use float or double for any calculations that require an exact answer. Use BigDecimal if you want the system to keep track of the decimal point and you don’t mind the inconvenience and cost of not using a primitive type. Using BigDecimal has the added advantage that it gives you full control over rounding, letting you select from eight rounding modes whenever an operation that entails rounding is performed. This comes in handy if you’re performing business calculations with legally mandated rounding behavior. If performance is
of the essence, you don’t mind keeping track of the decimal point yourself, and the quantities aren’t too big, use int or long. If the quantities don’t exceed nine decimal digits, you can use int; if they don’t exceed eighteen digits, you can use long. If the quantities might exceed eighteen digits, you must use BigDecimal.


Reference: Effective Java 2nd Edition by Joshua Bloch