BigDecimal and BigNumber literal G (like in Groovy)

[stokito]

Groovy has a cool feature that in my experience of development financial applications makes code more cleaner: decimal literal G for BigDecimal. http://docs.groovy-lang.org/next/html/documentation/core-syntax.html#_decimal_literals Instead of

new BigDecimal("1.0005").add(new BigDecimal(42.42))

show:

1.0005G + 42.42G

[petteyg]

While I usually dislike inventing new syntax when a working one already exists, G makes me think "giga", not "big". I'd rather see \u1e04, capital B with dot below (think B decimal).

[stokito]

Nice idea. Lets think more. I have this thought that might be useful to get right decision:

• With B personally I have first association like "Boolean" of "Binary" and even BTC (BitCoin) since I working a lot with financial systems.
• 0b - is already used in Groovy as binary literal
• Is anything special with Ḅ symbol usage? I mean does Ḅ already used somewhere in context of big numbers?
• I even don't like Big class names BigDecimal and BigInteger. I think it's wrong to call something "big" or "short". For me correct name is something like Real as used in mathematics notation. But it's not real "Real" since only 10 based number which is bad for precision.
• Yes, you right that G literal is something strange counter intuitive and yes it has strict association with unit prefixes "giga".
• So, why authors of Groovy chose G instead of B? I found their discussion and in short "There is a potential conflict with Hexidecimal literals and the numeric suffixes B". So for some reason they decided to use G (probably because biG). Also it was proposed to use M prefix as in C# but was rejected since "doesn't seem intuitive for BigInteger".
• Also .NET languages use M prefix for decimal which mean like "Money". Actually decimal is fixed size 128 bit so not exactly the same as BigDecimal.
• Also Stephen Colebourne known as author of JavaTime proposed to use N prefix. In comments also was proposed T as "Ten based number".

So it becomes hard to choice literal. But actually should we? Literals are needed to make your life easier when you write a code. But in your plugin you need to show the code. So I would like to propose you just to show BidDecimal and BigInteger as usual number:

new BigDecimal("1.0005").add(new BigDecimal(42.42))

is shown as:

1.0005 + 42.42

What do you think about this?

[cheptsov]

The latest EAP build supports basic things like

new BigDecimal("1.0005").add(new BigDecimal(42.42))

More complicated case are to be supported later:

new BigDecimal("1.0005").add(new BigDecimal(42.42)).multiply(new BigDecimal(1.0))