On 9/2/2010 4:15 PM, Jim Gibson wrote:
On 9/2/10 Thu Sep 2, 2010 12:52 PM, "Jim"<j...@lowcarbfriends.com>
scribbled:
On 9/2/2010 2:51 PM, Ruud H.G. van Tol wrote:
On 2010-09-02 15:32, Jim wrote:
I was hoping I'd see some answer like... oh yeah... perl is smart enough
to handle that for you if you are willing to accept a performance hit...
My "bigrat" was meant like that. Did you already try it?
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use bigrat;
<your code>
__END__
Sorry, I glanced over your advice. But both bigrat and bignum both
transparently do what I had hoped for. bigint looks like it truncates to
integers which is not a choice for my current problem.
Does anyone have significant experience with both bigrat and bignum such
that you would advise of use of one over the other. They seem to be very
similar.
Thank you. I'll work use of one of these into a bit of code at a time to
watch for any side effects.
Do you have any evidence that the use of either of these is warranted? So
far, you have only shown that printing floating-point numbers to some
limited precision involves rounding and can produce unexpected results. You
have not shown that the results are wrong, only that you expected something
else.
My advice is to stay away from these modules unless you know what you are
doing. I find that double-precision floating-point arithmetic is always good
enough. I have been programming in scientific and technical fields for 40
years and have yet to need extended-precision arithmentic.
If, on the other hand, you are working with large, financial transactions or
cryptography, you may need these modules. If that is the case, however, you
probably shouldn't be looking for help on a Perl beginner's list.
I just do not want anybody to get the impression that these modules are
needed for accurate arithmetic in Perl and that standard Perl arithmetic
operations are inaccurate.
I'm open to more advice. How would you rewrite my original toy code?
Jim
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