More on rounding....

[mikeh@minivend.com]

It isn't just Perl on my machine:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

main (argc, argv) {
    double r;
    char buf[32];
    r = 25.25 * .06;
    printf ("r %f rounds to %.2f\n", r, r);

    gcvt(r, 8, buf);
    printf ("gcvt says %s\n", buf);
    exit(0);
}

It seems like it is a glibc bug, because I have found no mention
of rounding problems on the Perl porters group, and there are no
arbitrary-precision decimal math packages available to solve what
you would think would be a common need.

Thanks for the investigation and bug report; don't know what I can do
but now that I am aware of the problem I might think of something. Just
doing this

	$r =~ s/(\d*\.\d+)/$1 . ( '0' x ( 16 - length($1) ) ) . 1/e;

might be practical, but I have learned to think about side effects before
making this kind of tweezy fix....

-- 
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