Dividing two integers to a double in java

roarknuppel picture roarknuppel · Sep 30, 2013 · Viewed 51.1k times · Source

I can see this is a common problem for new programmers, however I didn't succeed in implementing any of the solution to my code. Basically I want to divide w and v, which must be saved to a double variable. But it prints [0.0, 0.0, ... , 0.0]

public static double density(int[] w, int[] v){
double d = 0;
    for(L = 0; L < w.length; L++){
        d = w[L]  /v[L];
    }
    return d;
}

Answer

Richard Tingle picture Richard Tingle · Sep 30, 2013

This line here d = w[L] /v[L]; takes place over several steps

d = (int)w[L]  / (int)v[L]
d=(int)(w[L]/v[L])            //the integer result is calculated
d=(double)(int)(w[L]/v[L])    //the integer result is cast to double

In other words the precision is already gone before you cast to double, you need to cast to double first, so

d = ((double)w[L])  / (int)v[L];

This forces java to use double maths the whole way through rather than use integer maths and then cast to double at the end