Double vs. BigDecimal?

Question

I have to calculate some floating point variables and my colleague suggest me to use BigDecimal instead of double since it will be more precise. Bu

Answer 1

If you write down a fractional value like 1 / 7 as decimal value you get

1/7 = 0.142857142857142857142857142857142857142857...

with an infinite sequence of 142857. Since you can only write a finite number of digits you will inevitably introduce a rounding (or truncation) error.

Numbers like 1/10 or 1/100 expressed as binary numbers with a fractional part also have an infinite number of digits after the decimal point:

1/10 = binary 0.0001100110011001100110011001100110...

Doubles store values as binary and therefore might introduce an error solely by converting a decimal number to a binary number, without even doing any arithmetic.

Decimal numbers (like BigDecimal), on the other hand, store each decimal digit as is (binary coded, but each decimal on its own). This means that a decimal type is not more precise than a binary floating point or fixed point type in a general sense (i.e. it cannot store 1/7 without loss of precision), but it is more accurate for numbers that have a finite number of decimal digits as is often the case for money calculations.

Java's BigDecimal has the additional advantage that it can have an arbitrary (but finite) number of digits on both sides of the decimal point, limited only by the available memory.