From: perlnum:

Perl can internally represent numbers in 3 different ways: as native integers, as native floating point numbers, and as decimal strings. Decimal strings may have an exponential notation part, as in "12.34e-56" . Native here means "a format supported by the C compiler which was used to build perl".

If the number is represented in a format supported by the C compiler used to build Perl, it can be treated as a number, which is to say, you can sort it numerically using the numerical comparison operator, <=> (See perlop for an explanation of the flying-saucer operator. ;) ).

I would only question "e-133" as its status as a number. Is that 0e-133? That's still zero, but being that it starts as a non-numeric character, Perl might treat it as a string. If there is any question as to what Perl sees as a number, you can always use the Scalar::Util module's "looks_like_number()" function to determine what Perl thinks it is.

Of course there is the convenience with Perl that any string can be treated like a number. If it doesn't make sense as a number, it just evaluates to zero, which may or may not be what you want, but at least is "defined behavior."

sort { $a <=> $b }
[download]

sort function is working values. What's your problem and what have you tried?

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @arr = (3.00E-59, 8.00E-25, 8.00E-47, 0, 2.3, 6.00E-04, 5.00E-19, 3
+.00E-10, 1.00E-38, 4.00E-71, 6.00E-70, 2.00E-09, 2.00E-42, 9.00E-14, 
+7.00E-12, 0 );

print Dumper sort @arr;
[download]