It is not a bug that Perl rounds the display of numeric values to a number of digits that is fewer than the number of digits of precision that the internal floating point format achieves. It is an intentional feature due to the fact that you get even more complaints when a computation should yield 1/100 but the result gets displayed as "0.01000000000000002" (than the number of complaints for such not being "== 0.01").

Over time there have been adjustments as to how much difference there should be between the precision of the local floating point format vs. precision of Perl's display of numbers. But the (non-zero) difference should remain.

Wanting to see about 17 '9's or '0's near the end of a displayed number indicates a rather unrealistic expectation. 15 digits of accuracy is more than enough to notice that somebody misplaced a single grain of sand from your enormous beach. It is not important to inform a human that a single grain of sand was lost from the beach. The vast majority of situations are such that the loss of a single grain of sand from the beach is utterly insignificant. If you are in one of those rarefied situations where the exact number of grains of sand on your huge beach must not be off by even 1, then you shouldn't just be using mundane floating point.

- tye        

In reply to Re^2: Variables are automatically rounded off in perl (humans) by tye
in thread Variables are automatically rounded off in perl by Anonymous Monk

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