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Either for comparisons or initialization of a new variable, does it make a difference which one of these you use?
I know that BigDecimal.ZERO is a 1.5 feature, so that's a concern, but assuming I'm using 1.5 does it matter?
Thanks.
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Using the compareTo Method Two BigDecimal objects that are equal in value but have a different scale (like 2.0 and 2.00) are considered equal by this method. Therefore, we can check BigDecimal. ZERO. compareTo(givenBdNumber) == 0 to decide if givenBdNumber has the value zero.
using ". intValue()" on BigDecimal object is not right when you want to check if its grater than zero. The only option left is ". compareTo()" method.
If you are using type BigDecimal, then its default value is null (it is object, not primitive type), so you get [1] automatically.
BigDecimal.ZERO is a predefined constant and therefore doesn't have to be evaluated from a string at runtime as BigDecimal("0") would be. It will be faster and won't require creation of a new object.
If your code needs to run on pre-1.5, then you can use the (much maligned) Singleton pattern to create an object equivalent to BigDecimal.ZERO. The first time it is used, it would call BigDecimal("0") to create a zero object, and return that object on subsequent calls. Otherwise, if your code is running on a 1.5 system, your singleton object can just return BigDecimal.ZERO with no runtime penalty.
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Using ZERO doesn't create a new object or require any parsing. Definitely the way to go.
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