Like with most things perl, there's more then one way to do it. You could use Quantum::Superpositions, or (sort @array)[-1], or you could do somthing more reasonable, like

my $max=$array[0];
foreach (@array) {
 $max=$_ if ($_>$max)
}
[download]

Or you could use List::Util::max (which is included with perl >=5.8.0)

What's the code to retrieve the greatest (largest) numerical value in an array (list)?

No need to reinvent the wheel: use a module.

use List::Util qw(max);
$largest = max(qw(1 11 2 3));
print $largest;
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#!perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @array = 1..99;

my $largest = (sort @array)[-1];

print $largest;
[download]

   larryk                                          
perl -le "s,,reverse killer,e,y,rifle,lycra,,print"

If your array conntains non numerical values then you just need to add a test for digits in theorbtwo's suggestion:

foreach (@array) {
  if (/^\d+$/) {
    $max=$_ if ($_>$max)
  }
}
[download]



Hotshot

Hi,

If @array=(-3, -4, -2); then this code will fail.

The $max variable should be initialised by shift()ing a value from @array.
A small change would be required to the regex to allow negative numbers too. So we have

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @array=(-3,-4,-2);
my $max=shift @array ;

foreach (@array) {
  if (/^-?\d+$/) {
    $max=$_ if ($_>$max)
  }
}

print $max;
[download]

cheers

thinker