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

If you want to work with decimals, not rational numbers, and you need exact arithmetics before the final rounding (rounding to cents or something), here's a little trick.

You can always manipulate your formulas so that there's only one final division. That way you won't lose precision during calculations and you'll always get the correctly rounded result. For instance

a/b + c

equals

(a + bc) / b.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Is there a need for

a=1/3;
b=a*3;

resulting in

b==1;

in financial systems? I guess not. In financial systems it is defined, which roundmode and scale has to be used, when doing calculations. In some situations, the roundmode and scale is defined in the law. All components can rely on such a defined behaviour. Returning b==1 would be a failure, because it would not fulfill the specified behaviour. This is very important when calculating prices etc.

It is like the IEEE 754 specifications for representing floats in binary digits. A component must not optimize a "better" representation without loss of information, because this will break the contract.