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Postings from August 2021
On Thu, Aug 5, 2021 at 12:54 PM Harald Jörg <haj@posteo.de> wrote:
> Ovid via perl5-porters <perl5-porters@perl.org> writes:
>
> > Since we're talking about wishes, would a decimal type be interesting?
> For example, in floating point, you can't represent
> > .3. So the following evaluates to false:
> >
> > if ( 0 == .1 + .2 - .3 ) { ... }
> >
> > Fun fact: many COBOL-to-Java death marches have fallen down and not
> gotten back up because Java can't match COBOL's
> > precision due to lacking COBOL's native decimal type (and simulating a
> Decimal type via classes meant that Java couldn't
> > get the performance needed).
>
> In current Perl, you can get rather close like this:
>
> perl -Mbignum=a,31 -E 'say (0 == 0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3)' # prints 1
> perl -Mbignum=a,31 -E 'say (1 == 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3)' # prints ''
>
> If decimals were in core instead of objects of a core library, they
> could avoid the bignum pitfall (https://perldoc.perl.org/bignum#Caveats)
> and also the overhead for objects and overloading. Any further
> performance improvement could be applied to bignum as well.
>
> It might also encourage DB drivers to support the "decimal" data type
> where the DB engine supports it.
>
Yeah this is Math::BigFloat under the hood and that is the way to do
arbitrary precision decimals. But that has significant performance
implications even beyond the bignum problem and object overhead. If there's
a way (and this is the big question) to support limited precision decimals
with better performance than arbitrary precision decimals, I think core
support for that would be a significant boon for specific applications.
-Dan
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