I'm trying to deal with money (probably the wrong way as far as best practices but I thought it would work.. its simple, multiply everything by 100 and then use ints)
import java.util.Scanner;
public class PFiveFifteen {
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Scanner in =new Scanner(System.in);
int i = 0;
double principalIn;
int duration=0;
double interestRate=0;
int thisYear = 0;
int iInterestRate = 0;
int iPrincipalIn = 0;
System.out.println("Please input initial amount: ");
principalIn = in.nextDouble();
iPrincipalIn= (int) principalIn *100;
//System.out.println(principalIn*100);
System.out.println("Please input interest rate as a decimal: ");
interestRate = in.nextDouble()*100;
iInterestRate = (int) interestRate;
//System.out.println(interestRate*100);
System.out.println("Please input duration of investment in years: ");
duration = in.nextInt();
//System.out.println(duration);
while(duration > i ) {
if ( i == 0) {
//System.out.println("Preloop value" + (iInterestRate));
thisYear = (iPrincipalIn * iInterestRate)+ iPrincipalIn;
//System.out.println("Postloop value" + (iPrincipalIn));
i++;
System.out.println("The initial value is " + thisYear);
System.out.println("Year # one one: " +i);
}
else
thisYear = (thisYear*iInterestRate) + thisYear;
i++;
System.out.println(thisYear/10000);
System.out.println("year # " +i);
}
But I'm somehow getting negative numbers back in console
Please input initial amount:
10000
Please input interest rate as a decimal: 100.00
Please input duration of investment in years: 10
The initial value is 1411065408
Year # one one: 1 141106
year # 2 -119738
year # 3 -72104
year # 4 4904
year # 5 84261
year # 6 21917
year # 7 154073
year # 8 -145664
year # 9 63722
year # 10
What in the world is going on here? I could get if there where whacky decimals or soemthing ( even though I cast it all to ints) but what the dickens is taking all positive inputs to below zero??
Your idea of representing money amounts as integers is an OK one, but you have to be very careful of the scaling, especially when you multiply (or divide). Say you start with a principal of $10, which you represent as 1000. Then you enter an interest rate of 0.06 (I assume that the user is entering an actual rate and not a percentage, so 0.06 means 6%). You then represent that as 6.
So if your principal is P, the int you're using to represent it is P*100. And if your interest rate is I, the int you're using to represent it is I*100.
So now you want to compute P*I. Since you're representing everything as 100 times the actual value, you presumably want to get an int whose value is P*I*100. But when you multiply the two ints you have, P*100 and I*100, the result is P*I*10000 -- a factor of 100 too high. That's because you multiplied the scale factors together along with the values. I can see that you did output thisYear / 10000, but you didn't change thisYear. So as you keep going through the loop, you will get values that are a factor of 10000 too high, and 1000000 too high, and so on, and eventually you will overflow. (I wish things really did work that way, but unfortunately I can't talk my bank into using your algorithm.)
To adjust, you'll need to divide this result by 100. (I'd add 50 to it first, so that when you divide by 100 the result will be rounded.)