[java] What exactly does Double mean in java?

I'm extremely new to Java and just wanted to confirm what Double is? Is it similar to Float or Int? Any help would be appreciated. I also sometimes see the uppercase Double and other times the lower case double. If someone could clarify what this means that'd be great!

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

Deciding between 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.

Deciding between 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.

Correctness

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.

A double is an IEEE754 double-precision floating point number, similar to a float but with a larger range and precision.

IEEE754 single precision numbers have 32 bits (1 sign, 8 exponent and 23 mantissa bits) while double precision numbers have 64 bits (1 sign, 11 exponent and 52 mantissa bits).

A Double in Java is the class version of the double basic type - you can use doubles but, if you want to do something with them that requires them to be an object (such as put them in a collection), you'll need to box them up in a Double object.