[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Sometimes you’re so familiar with a class you stop
paying attention to it. If you could write the documentation for
java.lang.Foo, and Eclipse will helpfully autocomplete the
functions for you, why would you ever need to read its Javadoc?
Such was my experience with java.lang.Math, a class I thought I
knew really, really well. Imagine my surprise, then, when I
recently happened to be reading its Javadoc for possibly the first
time in half a decade and realized that the class had almost
doubled in size with 20 new methods I’d never heard of. Obviously
it was time to take another look.“Version 5 of the Java™ Language Specification added 10
new methods to java.lang.Math (and its evil twin
java.lang.StrictMath), and Java 6 added another 10. In this
article, I focus on the more purely mathematical functions
provided, such as log10 and cosh. In Part 2, I’ll explore the
functions more designed for operating on floating point numbers as
opposed to abstract real numbers.”