Whole numbers don’t accomplish what we need for every program. What if we wanted to store the price of something? We need a decimal point. What if we wanted to store the world’s population? That number would be larger than the int type can hold.

The double primitive data type can help. double can hold decimals as well as very large and very small numbers. The maximum value is 1.797,693,134,862,315,7 E+308, which is approximately 17 followed by 307 zeros. The minimum value is 4.9 E-324, which is 324 decimal places!

To declare a variable of type double, we use the double keyword in the declaration:

// doubles can have decimal places:
double price = 8.99;
// doubles can have values bigger than what an int could hold:
double gdp = 12237700000;