This is probably a newbie-ish question, but I can't really find the answer anywhere in the docs... So here goes: consider this piece of code:

$a = 3000000000000011;
print "a: $a";

If you run it, you get the following output:

a: 3.00000000000001e+15

Now I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but 3.00000000000001e+15 is what you get not only if you print it, but also when you try to insert it into a SQL table. And as my experience shows, Sybase is not very happy with this loss of precision, especially in a foreign key field. So is there any pragma, or some other way to tell perl not to do any funny things to your floats ? I found that saying $a = sprintf("%.0f",3000000000000011) solves the problem, but surely there must be a more elegant solution available...

In reply to Handling large numbers by Anonymous Monk

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