I would support renaming Scala's BigDecimal to Decimal (to avoid
confusion), although I don't find Java's BigDecimal particularly
compelling. In my opinion, if you want Java's BigDecimal behavior you
can always just use that class directly.
I don't expect people will want scala.math to contain two different
decimal implementations, which is why I mention this. I consider
creating a good decimal implementation for Scala more important than
maintaining compatibility with java.math.BigDecimal.
-- Erik
I would be fine with scala not having its own BigDecimal and instead having some better Decimal implementation. Right now, though, it looks like a wrapper class but it imposes different behavior than one would expect coming from the Java version. Having said that, it would be nice to have a Scala wrapper for it, since Java APIs (JDBC, for example) use BigDecimal.
Derek
Could we revisit https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-1812? BigDecimal is a tool with sharp edges, but that doesn't mean we have to blunt it so that the uninformed don't cut themselves, does it? At the very least, if we have to have a dumbed down version, could it just be scala.math.Decimal and leave scala.math.BigDecimal with the same default behaviors as the Java class it purports to wrap?