JAVA.ARITH.FPEQUAL : Floating Point Equality (Java)

Summary

A comparison between non-integral values might be unreliable.

Floating point operations are by nature approximated. This can introduce bugs when precise, mathematical properties are expected from inherently imprecise floating point computations. Moreover, computations that might lose precision or overflow, whose result is stored in a larger type, are suspicious since, by computing on the larger type from the beginning, one could avoid approximations and overflows.

Properties

WARNING_FILTER += discard class="Floating Point Equality (Java)"

Example

public class Approximation {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    for (double d = 0.0; d != 5.0; d += 0.001) // "Floating Point Equality (Java)" warning issued here

      System.out.println(d);
  }
}

The comparison between d != 5.0 will always yield true, because of approximations in the computation d += 0.001. The while loop will thus never terminate.

In this example, the programmer should replace d != 5.0 with d < 5.0 or replace floating point computations with (stable and more efficient) integral computations.

for (int d = 0; d != 5000; d++)
  System.out.println(d / 1000.0);

Resolution

Use approximated comparisons (up to some epsilon) rather than exact comparisons. Use integral numbers instead of floating point values, whenever possible. Compute over integral numbers and translate into floating points only at the end, whenever possible. If a large type for the result of a computation is desired, compute from the beginning on that type instead of applying a type conversion at the end of the computation.

Relevant Configuration File Parameters

The following configuration file parameters affect checks for this warning class.

• REPORT_SIMILAR_WARNINGS
• WARNING_FILTER