Programming Tutorials

Arithmetic Operators in Java

By: aathishankaran in Java Tutorials on 2007-02-05  

Java provides a rich operator environment. Most of its operators can be divided into the following four groups: arithmetic, bit wise, relational, and logical. Java also defines some additional operators that handle certain special situations. This article will describes java's operators except for the type comparison operator instance of.

Arithmetic operators

Arithmetic operators are used in mathematical expressions in the same way that they are used in algebra. The following table lists the arithmetic operators.

+	Addition
-	Subtraction (also unary minus)
*	Multiplication
/	Division
%	Modulus
++	Increment
+=	Addition assignment
-=	Subtraction assignment
*=	Multiplication assignment
/=	Division assignment
%=	Modulus assignment
--	Decrement

The operand of the arithmetic operators must be of a numeric type. You cannot use them on boolean types, but you can use them on char types, since the char type in java is, essentially, a subset of int.

The Basic Arithmetic Operators

The basic arithmetic operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division all behave, as you would expect for all numeric types. The minus operator also has a unary from which negates its single operand. Remember that when the division operator is applied to an integer type, there will be no fractional component attached to the result.

The following simple example program demonstrates the arithmetic operators, it also illustrates the difference between floating-point division and integer division.

//Demonstrate the basic arithmetic operators.

class BasicMath {

public static void main ( String args[] ) {

  // arithmetic using integers
  System.out.println("Integer Arithmetic");
  int a = 1+1;
  int b = a*3;
  int c = b/4;
  int d = c-a;
  int e= -d;
  System.out.println("a = " + a);
  System.out.println("b = " + b);
  System.out.println("c = " + c);
  System.out.println("d = " + d);
  System.out.println("e = " + e);

  // arithmetic using doubles
  System.out.println("floating point Arithmetic");
  double da = 1+1;
  double db = da*3;
  double dc = db/4;
  double dd = dc-a;
  double de= -dd;
  System.out.println("da = " + da);
  System.out.println("db = " + db);
  System.out.println("dc = " + dc);
  System.out.println("dd = " + dd);
  System.out.println("de = " + de);
}
}

When you run this program, you will see the following output:

Integer Arithmetic
a = 2
b = 6
c = 1
d = -1;
e = 1;

Floating point arithmetic
da = 2.0
db = 6.0
dc = 1.5
dd = -0.5;
de = 0.5;