It's cool if you need the precision and can live with the performance of infinite precision--which is generally abysmal.

But don't forget that on modern x86 and x64 hardware, the FPU uses 80-bit floats internally even when the calling code is using 64-bit floats. That greatly reduces the loss of precision of intermediate calculations provided that the math libraries are well written. Ie. They don't move intermediate values out of the FPU to ram and back again.

How effective Perl's math routines are at keeping intermediate values in the FPU registers I have no idea.

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In reply to Re^5: Large floating point literals by BrowserUk
in thread Large floating point literals by ig

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