Why is there an implicit conversion from Float/Double to BigDecimal, but not from String?

Posted by soc on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by soc
Published on 2011-01-16T11:31:37Z Indexed on 2011/01/16 11:53 UTC
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Although the situation of conversion from Doubles to BigDecimals has improved a bit compared to Java

scala> new java.math.BigDecimal(0.2)
res0: java.math.BigDecimal = 0.20000000000000001110223024625156...

scala> BigDecimal(0.2)
res1: scala.math.BigDecimal = 0.2

and things like

val numbers: List[BigDecimal] = List(1.2, 3.2, 0.7, 0.8, 1.1)

work really well, wouldn't it be reasonable to have an implicit conversion like

implicit def String2BigDecimal(s: String) = BigDecimal(s)

available by default which can convert Strings to BigDecimals like this?

val numbers: List[BigDecimal] = List("1.2", "3.2", "0.7", "0.8", "1.1")

Or am I missing something and Scala resolved all "problems" of Java with using the BigDecimal constructor with a floating point value instead of a String, and BigDecimal(String) is basically not needed anymore in Scala?

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