Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Math::BigFloat

Provides methods that permit use of floating-point numbers of arbitrary length. The following apply to all methods, except as noted:

• The object $ f remains unchanged.

• All methods except fcmp return a number string (nstr) of the form /[+-]\d+E[+-]\d+/, with embedded whitespace ignored.

• A return value of NaN indicates that either an input parameter was “Not a Number” or that an illegal operation was attempted.

• A similar default scale value is computed for square roots.