Imaginary / Complex numbers

Elliott has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there a standard way of handling imaginary and/or complex numbers in Perl?

I am writing a little utility (for fun - that's the kind of fun guy I am) to extract the roots of quartic equations and I have found that the square root of any negative number is returned as 2^31, which at least stops the script crashing but is otherwise not very helpful.

Is this OS-dependent?

Comment on Imaginary / Complex numbers

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Re: Imaginary / Complex numbers by Ionitor (Scribe) on Jul 22, 2002 at 13:43 UTC
I think you want Math::Complex from CPAN. This is probably the easiest and most standard way of handling it.	[reply]
Re: Imaginary / Complex numbers by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jul 22, 2002 at 13:46 UTC
`Math::Complex` is a standard module that comes with perl 5.8.0. You also might want to look into the PDL module. It has a lot of math functionality - though I'm not sure whether it actually has complex numbers. Abigail	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Imaginary / Complex numbers by etj (Deacon) on Jun 26, 2022 at 16:13 UTC
In 2002, there was basic support using PDL::Complex (which didn't have working matrix multiplication, and had an extra exposed dimension for real/imaginary, which caused problems). That still (as of 2.080) exists, but is now deprecated in favour of the "native complex" (C99) number functionality (cfloat, cdouble, cldouble types).	[reply]
Re: Imaginary / Complex numbers by dimmesdale (Friar) on Jul 22, 2002 at 13:45 UTC
I don't know that there's a standard ... but a quick search on CPAN came up with (many) math packages. It seems that Math::Complex (http://search.cpan.org/doc/JHI/perl-5.8.0/lib/Math/Complex.pm) is standard with perl. I haven't used it, so that's all I can offfer now.	[reply]


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