int variables just lop off the fractional part of a variable. In some cases, you need a variable type that offers the best of two worlds:
- Like a floating-point variable, it can store fractions.
- Like an integer, numbers of this type offer exact values for use in computations — for example, 12.5 is really 12.5 and not 12.500001.
decimal. A decimal variable can represent a number between 10–28 and 1028 — which represents a lot of zeros! And it does so without rounding problems.
Declaring a decimal
Decimal variables are declared and used like any variable type, like this:decimal m1 = 100; // Good
decimal m2 = 100M; // Better
The first declaration shown here creates a variable m1 and initializes it to a value of 100. What isn’t obvious is that 100 is actually of type int. Thus, C# must convert the int into a decimal type before performing the initialization. Fortunately, C# understands what you mean — and performs the conversion for you.
The declaration of m2 is the best. This clever declaration initializes m2 with the decimal constant 100M. The letter M at the end of the number specifies that the constant is of type decimal. No conversion is required.
Comparing decimals, integers, and floating-point types
Thedecimal variable type seems to have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of int or double types. Variables of this type have a very large range, they don’t suffer from rounding problems, and 25.0 is 25.0 and not 25.00001.The decimal variable type has two significant limitations, however. First, a decimal is not considered a counting number because it may contain a fractional value. Consequently, you can’t use them in flow-control loops.
The second problem with decimal variables is equally serious or even more so. Computations involving decimal values are significantly slower than those involving either simple integer or floating-point values. On a crude benchmark test of 300,000,000 adds and subtracts, the operations involving decimal variables were approximately 50 times slower than those involving simple int variables. The relative computational speed gets even worse for more complex operations. Besides that, most computational functions, such as calculating sines or exponents, are not available for the decimal number type.
Clearly, the decimal variable type is most appropriate for applications such as banking, in which accuracy is extremely important but the number of calculations is relatively small.