I understand that the internal representation is (probably) floating point. However that is still an assumption of what the internal representation "decimal string" actually is. My point is that using the eq operator targets "decimal string" which has a lower precision (for DWIM reasons?), so you are absolutely right that that method smoothes the rounding errors from floats away

printf "%.20f",$var

This targeted floating point with high precision.

This is what I (presumably) hope to target with the eq:

printf "%.11f", $num2*100 ; # 1990.00000000000

I'm not sure if $.11f now shows the exact correct number of decimals (which should be 15 I believe), but as far as I can see this solves OP's problem and that is why I suggested it. Just using eq is in my opinion fine for this particular use case. For the rest floating point is always a pain in the... well, you know


In reply to Re^5: number comparison with a twist by Veltro
in thread number comparison with a twist by anotherguest

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.