[tonynator]

>If you ask an engineer if 2.5 and 2.50 are the same, they will say no They will say it depends on the context. If you don't look into the implementation, the class name and maybe a short summary provides that context and clearly misleads people

[zeroimpl]

Right, but in this case the short summary being posted is poor. In the context of a language like Java, floating point is synonymous with IEEE base-2 floats. BigDecimal is not used to store arbitrary precision floats, but rather fixed precision decimals. Otherwise it would be called BigFloat.

Also the scale parameter really isn’t an implementation detail. Virtually every non-trivial method defined in the class requires you to understand the scale parameter in order to get the result you want.