More questions stemming from cookbook work... Decimal Comparisons: The most common recipe around for comparisons is to use sprintf to cut the decimals to size and then compare strings. Seems ugly.
The non-stringification way to do it is usually along the lines of: if (abs($value1 - $value2) < abs($value1 * epsilon)) (From Mastering Algorithms with Perl errata) I'm wondering though, if C<$value1 == $value2> is always wrong (or almost always wrong) then should it be smarter and: a. throw a warning b. DWIM using overloaded operators (as in reduce precision then compare) c. throw a warning but have other comparison operators just for this case to make sure you know what you're doing I'd vote for b., but I don't know enough about the problem domain to know if that is safe, and realistically I just want to write the cookbook entry rather than start a math-geniuses flame war ;-) Which leads to another question: Are there $value.precision() and $value.accuracy() methods available for decimals? I'd really rather not do the string comparison if it can be avoided, maybe it's just the purist in me saying "leave the numbers be" :-) Apologies in advance if this is somewhere I missed. I did a lot of searching. Marcus Adair
