Patrick R. Michaud via RT wrote: >I don't know that we should expect .perl or any other operation on Num >values to be preserving more precision than that.
I'd expect .perl to preserve whatever precision is there. Accurately representing the value, in a form understandable by .EVAL, is its raison d'etre. The value I'm using in this example is 2**70, a very round number that is easily represented in floating point. If the lengthy decimal representation is putting you off, consider > (2e0**70).perl.EVAL == 2e0**70 False > > (1180591620717411303424.0e0 + 1.0 ).Int > 1180591620717411303424 > > (1180591620717411303424.0e0 + 10 ).Int > 1180591620717411303424 These are as expected: floating point rounding applies, and the results obtained are the closest representable values to the mathematically correct result. This is a red herring. My example doesn't invoke any operation requiring rounding. The initial decimal literal has the exact representable value, which gets represented correctly as a Num. I don't then perform any arithmetic on it. -zefram
