Question

I’m using BigDecimal for some floating-point math. If you divide 5 by 4.2 you’ll get an exception (as the result has a non-terminating expansion which cannot be represented by a BigDecimal) i.e.

BigDecimal five = new BigDecimal("5");
BigDecimal fourPointTwo = new BigDecimal("4.2");
five.divide(fourPointTwo) // ArithmeticException: Non-terminating decimal expansion; no exact representable decimal result.

I’m prepared to lose some precision in this case, so I am going to use the divide(...) method which allows a scale for the result to be provided:

five.divide(fourPointTwo, 2, RoundingMode.HALF_UP); //Fine, but obviously not 100% accurate

What scale should I pass to this method so that the result is as accurate as if I had performed the calculation using two doubles?

Answer 1

From the javadocs of the BigDecimal class:

If zero or positive, the scale is the number of digits to the right of the decimal point. If negative, the unscaled value of the number is multiplied by ten to the power of the negation of the scale. The value of the number represented by the BigDecimal is therefore (unscaledValue × 10^-scale).

The precision of double varies accordingly to the order of magnitude of the value. According to this, it uses 52 bits to store the unsigned mantissa, so any integer that may be represented with 52 bits will be ok. This will be roughly 18 decimal digits.

Further, double uses 11 bits to store the exponent. So, something like 4 decimal precision will do. This way, any integer up to 52 bits multiplied by a positive or negative power of 2 with at most 10 bits may be represented (one bit is the sign of the expoent). Beyond that, you start to lose precision.

The extra bit of double stores the sign.

This way, scale 18 + 4 = 22 will be at least as precise as double.