Mathematics

B.9 Mathematics

Perl can do just about any kind of mathematics you can dream up.

B.9.1 Advanced Math Functions

All of the basic mathematical functions (square root, cosine, logarithm, absolute value, and many others) are available as built in functions; see the perlfunc manpage for details. Some others (like tangent or base-10 logarithm) are omitted, but those may be easily created from the basic ones, or loaded from a simple module that does so. (See the POSIX module for many common math functions.)

B.9.2 Imaginary and Complex Numbers

Although the core of Perl doesn't directly support them, there are modules available for working with complex numbers. These overload the normal operators and functions, so that you can still multiply with * and get a square root with sqrt, even when using complex numbers. See the Math::Complex module.

B.9.3 Large and High-Precision Numbers

You can do math with arbitrarily large numbers with an arbitrary number of digits of accuracy. For example, you could calculate the factorial of two thousand, or determine to ten-thousand digits. See the Math::BigInt and Math::BigFloat modules.