Re: BigFloat Precision

Take a look at my comments deeper down. Otherwise all I can say is good luck, I've had similar problems and was unable to solve them satisfactorily. I did notice though that unless you need precision exceeding 30+ decimal places that perl scalars (in 5.8 at least) will give the same results and are much much faster.

PS> I wonder if the problem is not so much precision as accuracy ;-)

-- I'm not belgian but I play one on TV. On dit que je parle comme un belge aussi.

Comment on Re: BigFloat Precision

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Re^2: BigFloat Precision by Anonymous Monk on Apr 26, 2005 at 17:48 UTC
I did notice though that unless you need precision exceeding 30+ decimal places that perl scalars (in 5.8 at least) will give the same results and are much much faster. You'll only get 30+ decimal digits if you're using some special hardware and a special version of perl to take advantage of it (Sparc-V9 hardware has 128bit quad floating point numbers). If you're using IEEE754 64bit doubles (like on Intel hardware) you'll only get about 15 significant decimal digits. `perl -e 'printf "%.30f\n",(1/3)'`	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^2: BigFloat Precision
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 26, 2005 at 17:48 UTC

I did notice though that unless you need precision exceeding 30+ decimal places that perl scalars (in 5.8 at least) will give the same results and are much much faster.

perl -e 'printf "%.30f\n",(1/3)'

[reply]
[d/l]