How to express numbers in scientific notation in java?

Question

I'm writing a program that deals with planets' mass and diameter; These quantities are expressed in scientific notation. My question is NOT, mind you, NOT how does one print large numbers the right way (That's using printf(), duh), its how I would... "type" these numbers, I guess you could say. For example, the mass of mercury is expressed:

3.30 x 10ˆ23

And in my array of planet masses, an element would look:

33.0 * Math.pow(10, 23)

However, I don't quite think this is the right way - it looks like it would throw an exception... So how could I express large numbers like that from a programmer's perspective? Thanks!

Solution 1

Section 3.10.2 of the JLS talks about floating-point literals in Java. In short, provide the decimal part as if it were scientific notation, but instead of x 10^23 you would write e23:

3.30e23

To write one with a negative exponent, you can do that easily also for 6.67 x 10^(-11):

6.67e−11

Solution 2

Java does support scientific notation:

3.30e23