For portability, you can just skip pack and store your floating-point numbers as strings. With no extra work, you risk losing only about 3 bits of accuracy in the process (and you can lose that much with just a few arithmatic calculations so this might not be a problem at all).

If those three bits are important, then you can write your floating-point numbers via sprintf "%.20e",$num and read them just the normal Perl way and you won't lose any bits of accuracy between platforms with the same accuracy of floating-point numbers (the best you can do). ["%.20e" should be exact for up-to-64-bit mantissas, which should be overkill for most platforms. "%.16e" is probably all you really need.]

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: newbie: unpacking real numbers by tye
in thread newbie: unpacking real numbers by perchance

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