Why does Math.floor return a double?

Question

Official Javadoc says that Math.floor() returns a double that is \"equal to a mathematical integer\", but then why shouldn\'t it return an in

Answer 1

Others have told you the why, I'm going to tell you how to round correctly given you want to do this. If you are only going to use positive numbers, then you can use this statement:

int a=(int) 1.5;

However, the (int) always rounds towards 0. Thus, if you want to do a negative number:

int a=(int) -1.5; //Equal to -1

In my case, I didn't want to do this. I used the following code to do the rounding, and it seems to handle all of the edge cases well:

private static long floor(double a)
{
    return (int) Math.floor(a);
}