I just synced with the most recent version of 5.9.0, and I cannot reproduce this:

    $ /opt/perl/5.9.0/bin/perl -wle 'print q(").(100**100**100).q(")'
    "inf"
    $ /opt/perl/5.8.1/bin/perl -wle 'print q(").(100**100**100).q(")'
    "inf"
[download]

That means that it's either fixed, or the stringification is done by some library, which works correctly on my platform, and not yours.

Could you compile with the newest blead and see what happens? If you still get a problem, send a report to p5p, with the output of perl -V.

Abigail