On websites like StackOverflow, if you post something about floating point math, it will get closed very quickly as a duplicate of the ‘is floating point broken’ question. Very often it is a duplicate of that question, however there are occasions when this is not the case.
The general question is typically how come 1.1 + 2.2 != 3.3?. There are a lot of resources about this. The long and the short of it is that binary representations of floating point numbers are not the actual numbers, but close approximations to them, so as a result equality sometimes isn’t, and you end up having to do ‘fudge’ math (a == b becomes fabs(a – b) < fudge). It’s great fun (and I mean that in the most sarcastic manner possible).
Sometimes, it’s about the display of floating point numbers, and it’s really frustrating when the question gets closed for the wrong reason. This can be especially frustrating for the OP, who may be new to the site and gets a poor impression from this.
The issue, in this case was about missing precision on the display of java floating point values.
In java the code:
float f = 2.0f / 3.0f;
System.out.println(f);
Will only display 7 decimal places. This is because it’s a 32bit float, and can only represent up to that level of precision.
The code:
double d = 2.0 / 3.0;
System.out.println(d);
Will display 15 decimal places. This is because it’s a 64bit float, which can represent up to that level of precision.
So, if you want 15 decimal places in the default number math, you need to use the double.
This is all moot if you’re dealing with money. I really do hope you’re not using float to represent money. That’s how you get an audit. In the words of a great philosopher, that’s a German car, the ‘T’ is silent 🙂