Floating-point Numbers in

About Floating-point Numbers

A floating-point number is a number with zero or more digits behind the decimal separator. Examples are -2.4, 0.1, 3.14, 16.984025 and 1024.0.

Different floating-point types can store different numbers of digits after the digit separator - this is referred to as its precision. This means that trying to store PI in a single will only store the first 6 to 9 digits (with the last digit being rounded).

Floating point numbers in Clojure are read as Doubles; with M suffix they are read as BigDecimals.

• Double: 8 bytes (~15-17 digits precision). This is the most common type. Written as 2.45.
• BigDecimal: Arbitrary precision integer unscaled value and a 32-bit integer scale. Written as 2.45M.