Help with using cout for decimals

[ChaoticFactor]

I'm really new to C++, been doing it for only 2 days and while trying to create random things I noticed that I couldn't use cout to print numbers with decimal places.

For example, why does this code print the number 3 instead of 3.5? I've tried searching for the solution but I can't find it, please help.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()

{
    double a = 7/2;
    cout << a << endl; // prints out the number 3 instead of 3.5
}

[mobotus]

integer division

try:

double a = 7 / 2.0;

[ChaoticFactor]

Works like a charm, thanks for helping a nooby!

[Protomega]

Just to give a little clarity as to why (Not full clarity) this happened. When you did double a = 7/2, you gave it two integers which told the computer to use integer division which would return an integer versus the version that would return a double. To do this we could do something called type casting. In this case we would be changing either the 7 or the 2 from an int into a double. We can do this by saying:

double a = 7/(double)2

The way shown is C-Style casting.