Learning Java, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11. Core Utilities

In this chapter, we’ll continue our look at the core Java APIs, covering more of the tools of the java.util package. The java.util package includes a wide range of utilities including tools for mathematical operations, working with dates and times, holding structured collections of objects, storing user preference data, and logging.

Math Utilities

Java supports integer and floating-point arithmetic directly in the language. Higher-level math operations are supported through the java.lang.Math class. As you may have seen by now, wrapper classes for primitive data types allow you to treat them as objects. Wrapper classes also hold some methods for basic conversions. Java provides the java.util.Random class for generating random numbers.

First, a few words about built-in arithmetic in Java. Java handles errors in integer arithmetic by throwing an ArithmeticException :

    int zero = 0;

    try {
        int i = 72 / zero;
    } catch ( ArithmeticException e ) {
        // division by zero
    }

To generate the error in this example, we created the intermediate variable zero. The compiler is somewhat crafty and would have caught us if we had blatantly tried to perform division by a literal zero.

Floating-point arithmetic expressions, on the other hand, don’t throw exceptions. Instead, they take on the special out-of-range values shown in Table 11-1.

Table 11-1. Special floating-point values

Value	Mathematical representation
POSITIVE_INFINITY	1.0/0.0
NEGATIVE_INFINITY	-1.0/0.0