Re: Float/Double/BigDecimal promotion & numeric literals

On 24 Jun 2004, at 08:15, John Wilson wrote:

>
> On 24 Jun 2004, at 06:41, J. Matthew Pryor wrote:
>
>> I was trying to call an inherited Java method from a groovy class
>>
>> Let's say the method was declared as
>>
>> void someInheritedMethod(Object param1, double param2)
>>
>> In my groovy class I was doing this:
>>
>> double doubleParam = 60000.0;
>> someInheritedMethod(anObject, doubleParam);
>>
>> Now that was bombing out with an InvalidArgumentException : 
>> incompatible
>> argument type (or something like that) and I now realize that the 
>> problem
>> was probably that despite declaring doubleParam as double, it was 
>> being
>> promoted to a BigDecimal (least surprising apparently , and then 
>> couldn't
>> be demoted to double when it came time to call the method? [that's my 
>> theory
>> anyway]
>>
>> So I changed the code to this:
>> double doubleParam = 60000D;
>> someInheritedMethod(anObject, doubleParam.doubleValue());
>>
>> This variant caused a syntax error on the 'D' : not sure if that's a 
>> fair
>> cop or not, but changing it to:
>> double doubleParam = 60000.0D;
>> someInheritedMethod(anObject, doubleParam.doubleValue());
>>
>> Worked fine [perhaps I don't need the .doubleValue() part]
>>
>> 2 questions:
>>
>> 1. Is my theory about why the first code failed correct? Does that 
>> seem
>> reasonable given I was statically typing?
>> 2. Should 60000D really be a syntax error, whereas 60000.0D is not?
>>
>> Yeah I know that is 3 questions, but anyway ....
>>
>>
>
> I think it should have worked OK the first time.
>
> I'm currently looking at the way in which the runtime selects methods 
> to call. It is certainly broken for some cases at the moment. It's a 
> bit tricky to get it right but I think I'm making progress!

Great stuff - thanks John! Basically when it can't find an exact match, 
we need to add rules to use the closest numeric types, auto up casting 
from smaller numbers to larger numbers.

I think there's a few issues in JIRA for this bug...

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-467

James
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