OutOfMemoryError on BigInteger

Question

I'm writing a polish notation calculator for BigIntegers (just *, ^ and !) and I'm getting an OutOfMemoryError on the line where I'm subtracting BigInteger.ONE to get the factorial to work, why?

package polish_calculator;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.math.BigInteger;
import java.util.Stack;

public class Main {
    static BigInteger factorial(BigInteger number){
        Stack <BigInteger> factorialStack = new Stack<BigInteger>();
        factorialStack.push(number);

        while (!number.equals(BigInteger.ONE)){ //load the stack
            factorialStack.push(number.subtract(BigInteger.ONE)); // here's the error
        }

        BigInteger result = BigInteger.ONE;

        while(!factorialStack.empty()){ // empty and multiply the stack
            result.multiply(factorialStack.pop());
        }

        return result;
    }


    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        BigInteger testFactorial = new BigInteger("12");
        System.out.println(factorial(testFactorial));
        Stack <String> stack = new Stack<String>();
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
        String readExpression = br.readLine();
        while(!readExpression.equals("")){
            String [] splittedExpression = readExpression.split(" ");
            for(int i=0; i<splittedExpression.length;i++){
                if(splittedExpression[i].equals("*"))
                {
                    BigInteger operand1 = new BigInteger(stack.pop());
                    BigInteger operand2 = new BigInteger(stack.pop());
                    BigInteger result = operand1.multiply(operand2);
                    String stackString = result.toString();
                    stack.push(stackString);
                }
                if(splittedExpression[i].equals("^"))
                {
                    BigInteger operand1 = new BigInteger(stack.pop());
                    BigInteger operand2 = new BigInteger(stack.pop());
                    BigInteger result = operand1.modPow(operand2, BigInteger.ONE);
                    String stackString = result.toString();
                    stack.push(stackString);
                }

                if(splittedExpression[i].equals("!"))
                {
                    BigInteger operand1 = new BigInteger(stack.pop());
                    BigInteger result = factorial(operand1);

                    String stackString = result.toString();
                    stack.push(stackString);
                }
                else{ //it's an integer
                    stack.push(splittedExpression[i]);
               }
            } // end for splittedExpression.length
        }
    }
}

Error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
        at java.math.BigInteger.subtract(BigInteger.java:1118)
        at polish_calculator.Main.factorial(Main.java:45)
        at polish_calculator.Main.main(Main.java:65)
Java Result: 1

Answer 1

BigInteger.subtract generates a new BigInteger, which you are pushing onto the stack.

But the original number is still the same, so the condition !number.equals(BigInteger.ONE) will never be true.

So you fill the stack forever with copies of number-1 until you run out of memory

Edited (again):

Note that is also a very memory-hungry way of calculating the factorial, since you need to push N values on the stack to calculate N! Multiplying them as you go along would be better, although of course you don't need a large N before the factorial becomes very large indeed.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial for some details on calculating large factorials efficiently.