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In Groovy, Numbers are actually represented as object’s, all of them being an instance of the class Integer. To make an object do something, we need to invoke one of the methods declared in its class.

Groovy supports integer and floating point numbers.

• An integer is a value that does not include a fraction.
• A floating-point number is a decimal value that includes a decimal fraction.

An Example of numbers in Groovy is shown below −

Integer x = 5; 
Float y = 1.25; 

Where x is of the type Integer and y is the float.

The reason why numbers in groovy are defined as objects is generally because there are requirements to perform operations on numbers. The concept of providing a class over primitive types is known as wrapper classes.

By default the following wrapper classes are provided in Groovy.

The object of the wrapper class contains or wraps its respective primitive data type. The process of converting a primitive data types into object is called boxing, and this is taken care by the compiler. The process of converting the object back to its corresponding primitive type is called unboxing.

Example

Following is an example of boxing and unboxing −

class Example { 
   static void main(String[] args) {
      Integer x = 5,y = 10,z = 0; 
		
      // The the values of 5,10 and 0 are boxed into Integer types 
      // The values of x and y are unboxed and the addition is performed 
      z = x+y; 
      println(z);
   }
}

The output of the above program would be 15. In the above example, the values of 5, 10, and 0 are first boxed into the Integer variables x, y and z accordingly. And then the when the addition of x and y is performed the values are unboxed from their Integer types.

Number Methods

Since the Numbers in Groovy are represented as classes, following are the list of methods available.

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