Why is there an implicit conversion from Float/Double to BigDecimal, but not from String?

Question

Although the situation of conversion from Doubles to BigDecimals has improved a bit compared to Java

scala> new java.math.BigDecimal(0.2)
res0: java.math.BigDecimal = 0.20000000000000001110223024625156...

scala> BigDecimal(0.2)
res1: scala.math.BigDecimal = 0.2

and things like

val numbers: List[BigDecimal] = List(1.2, 3.2, 0.7, 0.8, 1.1)

work really well, wouldn't it be reasonable to have an implicit conversion like

implicit def String2BigDecimal(s: String) = BigDecimal(s)

available by default which can convert Strings to BigDecimals like this?

val numbers: List[BigDecimal] = List("1.2", "3.2", "0.7", "0.8", "1.1")

Or am I missing something and Scala resolved all "problems" of Java with using the BigDecimal constructor with a floating point value instead of a String, and BigDecimal(String) is basically not needed anymore in Scala?

Answer 1

This was thought of, but apparently rolled back because it created ambiguous conversions. See this thread on the scala-list.

The thread is old, but as far as I can see, string2Bigdecimal is still not defined as an implicit.

If you still want to have a local string2BigDecimal implicit for your personal use:

• the rules for implicit scope can be found in the specification, §7.2,
• to resolve ambiguities in favor of your string2BigDecimal, you should define it using subclassing, see this paper (§6.5) for an example, and this one (§ Avoiding Ambiguities) for an explanation.