And you can also lose precision by stringifying the numbers:

@a= (1/3, 3); 
$prod1= eval join "*", @a; 
$prod2= 1; $prod2*= $_ for @a; 
print $prod1,$/, $prod2,$/;
[download]

0.999999999999999
1
[download]

I'm not trying to attack you, but this can be a trap at other times when you store floating-point numbers as text. I learned in when I wrote the obfu Fun with duff's device and AUTOLOAD.

Also look at what happens if the numbers are object with stringification. Look:

use Math::Complex; @a= (1+i, 2); $prod1= eval join "*", @a; $prod2= 1;
+ $prod2*= $_ for @a; print $prod1,$/, $prod2,$/;
[download]

1+2i
2+2i
[download]

And that will fail if some of the numbers is a NaN or Infinity.

I said it was stupid.