I'm thinking that it might make sense to use Math::BigRat for the calculations and only convert to "float" for display purposes (do your own output routines). I've always found floating point to be treacherous, and have gotten burned more than once by unexpected behavior and rounding errors (and, at first, naive comparisons with zero).

I haven't done a comparison of how fast BigRat works compared to BigFloat, so it may not be worth the effort after all.


In reply to Re: RFC: Large Floating Point Numbers - Rounding Errors by baruch60610
in thread RFC: Large Floating Point Numbers - Rounding Errors by GAVollink

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