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Postings from October 2003
On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 11:41:46PM +0200, Tels <perl_dummy@bloodgate.com> wrote: > But why does > > perl -le "print +(81**3)**(1/3)" > > print 81 and not 80.99999999999999? perldoc print only says that it will print See $# in perlvar.pod (admittedly a hard-to-find piece of documentation). IEEE doubles have 53 bits of precision. This works out to just shy of 15.9+ digits, and perl will use 15 digits when stringizing an NV (actually something like sprintf "%.15g"). If perl tried to round up to 16 digits, there would be many test failures, since e.g. print 8.2 would give 8.199999999999999.