in reply to Math 101 anyone?

I just tried out the behaviour of Perl in this case and found this:
perl -e "print 1/10"
gives the result 0.1

Also does
perl -e "print 1.0 / 10"
and
perl -e "print 1.0 / 10.0".

But
perl -e "print 100.1 - 100.0"
gives the well known 0.0999999999999943.

(All under ActiveStates Perl 5.8.0 under Windows 2000.)

Is there a special mechanism in Perl that "saves" the fraction? Or do I miss something else?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Math 101 anyone?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Oct 13, 2004 at 09:28 UTC

    Try this: 

    printf "%.32f\n", 1/10;
0.10000000000000001000000000000000

    [download]
    Examine what is said, not who speaks.
    "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
    "Think for yourself!" - Abigail
    "Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon
[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom