IBM's developerWorks has published my latest article, Java's new math, Part 2: Floating point numbers. Sometimes you're so familiar with a class you stop paying attention to it. If you could write the documentation for java.lang.Foo
, and Eclipse will helpfully autocomplete the functions for you, why would you ever need to read its Javadoc? Such was my experience with java.lang.Math
, a class I thought I knew really, really well. Imagine my surprise, then, when I recently happened to be reading its Javadoc for possibly the first time in half a decade and realized that the class had almost doubled in size with 20 new methods I'd never heard of. Obviously it was time to take another look.
Java 5 added 10 new methods to java.lang.Math
and Java 6 added another 10. Part 2 focuses on the functions that make sense only when you realize that they're designed for operating on floating-point numbers instead of abstract real numbers.