Mastering Modern Perl: Writing Efficient and Maintainable Code/

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Numbers

Numbers

Learn about the representation of numbers in Perl.

We'll cover the following...

Perl supports numbers as both integers and floating-point values.

We can represent them with scientific notation as well as in binary, octal, and hexadecimal forms:

Perl
my $integer = 42;
say $integer;
my $float = 0.007;
say $float;
my $sci_float = 1.02e14;
say $sci_float;
my $binary = 0b101010;
say $binary;
my $octal = 052;
say $octal;
my $hex = 0x20;
say $hex;
# only in Perl 5.22 or later
my $hex_float = 0x1.0p-3;
say $hex_float;

Internal representation of different formats

The numeric prefixes 0b, 0, and 0x specify binary, octal, and hex notation. Be aware that a leading zero on an integer always indicates the octal mode.

Note: Even though we can write floating-point values explicitly with perfect accuracy, Perl represents them internally in a binary format, like most programming languages. This representation is sometimes imprecise in ...