ArithmeticException thrown during BigDecimal.divide

Question

I thought java.math.BigDecimal is supposed to be The Answer™ to the need of performing infinite precision arithmetic with decimal numbers.

Consider the followi

Answer 1

You should prefer BigDecimal for finance calculations. Rounding should be specified by the business. E.g. an amount (100,00$) has to be split equally across three accounts. There has to be a business rule which account takes the extra cent.

Double, floats are not approriate for use in financial applications because they can not represent fractions of 1 precisely that are not exponentials of 2. E.g. consider 0.6 = 6/10 = 1*1/2 + 0*1/4 + 0*1/8 + 1*1/16 + ... = 0.1001...b

For mathematic calculations you can use a symbolic number, e.g. storing denominator and numerator or even a whole expression (e.g. this number is sqrt(5)+3/4). As this is not the main use case of the java api you won' find it there.