I've no idea what you are trying to do here. Since $ARGV [0] and $ARGV 1 are both integers, its product will be an integer too. Hence, their product will not have digits after the decimal point. Using sprintf and "%f" is a trick to avoid "scientific" output, when the result gets bigger than maxint, but you must realize the value will be inaccurate. However, there's no need for the substitution, the last three lines can be written as:

    printf "%.0f\n" => $ARGV [0] * $ARGV [1];
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Abigail