SPARC has support for a quadruple precision floating-point format (though, actually not implemented in hardware but emulated by software) that can be used from perl enabling the long-double flag at compilation time.

Though, as it is described in the documented linked by the AnonMonk above, rounding errors will still happen because the sets of numbers that can be represented in base 2 floats and in base 10 floats are different.

Also, it should be possible to develop a C/XS math library for fixed-length float-point with base 10 exponent representation of numbers that would be faster than Math::BigFloat that uses a variable length representation. For your particular case, a fixed-point representation may also work.


In reply to Re: RFC: Large Floating Point Numbers - Rounding Errors by salva
in thread RFC: Large Floating Point Numbers - Rounding Errors by GAVollink

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.