In a comment on @paxdiablo's answer, you asked:
"So basically, is it better to use Double than Float?"
That is a complicated question. I will deal with it in two parts
double
versus float
On the one hand, a double
occupies 8 bytes versus 4 bytes for a float
. If you have many of them, this may be significant, though it may also have no impact. (Consider the case where the values are in fields or local variables on a 64bit machine, and the JVM aligns them on 64 bit boundaries.) Additionally, floating point arithmetic with double
values is typically slower than with float
values ... though once again this is hardware dependent.
On the other hand, a double
can represent larger (and smaller) numbers than a float
and can represent them with more than twice the precision. For the details, refer to Wikipedia.
The tricky question is knowing whether you actually need the extra range and precision of a double
. In some cases it is obvious that you need it. In others it is not so obvious. For instance if you are doing calculations such as inverting a matrix or calculating a standard deviation, the extra precision may be critical. On the other hand, in some cases not even double
is going to give you enough precision. (And beware of the trap of expecting float
and double
to give you an exact representation. They won't and they can't!)
There is a branch of mathematics called Numerical Analysis that deals with the effects of rounding error, etc in practical numerical calculations. It used to be a standard part of computer science courses ... back in the 1970's.
Double
versus Float
For the Double
versus Float
case, the issues of precision and range are the same as for double
versus float
, but the relative performance measures will be slightly different.
A Double
(on a 32 bit machine) typically takes 16 bytes + 4 bytes for the reference, compared with 12 + 4 bytes for a Float
. Compare this to 8 bytes versus 4 bytes for the double
versus float
case. So the ratio is 5 to 4 versus 2 to 1.
Arithmetic involving Double
and Float
typically involves dereferencing the pointer and creating a new object to hold the result (depending on the circumstances). These extra overheads also affect the ratios in favor of the Double
case.
Having said all that, the most important thing is correctness, and this typically means getting the most accurate answer. And even if accuracy is not critical, it is usually not wrong to be "too accurate". So, the simple "rule of thumb" is to use double
in preference to float
, UNLESS there is an overriding performance requirement, AND you have solid evidence that using float
will make a difference with respect to that requirement.