You'd get the same output without the addition:

my $float = 0.00;
print "$float\n"; # prints "0"
[download]

Note that what you're doing when printing is coercing a number to a string. Perl's principle is to do this in the most basic way it can. If the number is technically a float internally, but its decimal expansion is .0000..., its string conversion will just look like an int. If you want it to look different, consider sprintf.