Thanks, all is happy now. I left my first line 'ungolfed' as I actually have 7 other unrelated parameters on the command line after the two IPs.

I thought I should answer my original question about BigInt initialisation that was rightfully dispelled.

I was assuming Perl was as strongly typed as Java, and it is done a lot in Java to force data types to an outputable format from default output functions in some of the java system calls.

Java would do something like this to force an integer to a string so it can pass it to initialise a BigInt: $bigint1.new("",$integer); In Perl there is no need, and the best thing is that BigInts can have ordinary arithmetic functions applied to them, most other BigInts I have seen in other languages have their own BigInt arithmetic functions which make life a mind bending hassle  $x=$bigint1.add($x,$y); for example.

So..... my point?

Numbers and strings are interchangeable (as written in many a Perl book) so you can just assign a numeric variable in the place of a string:

use Math::BigInt;

$std1 = 67*34;
$bigint1 = Math::BigInt->new($std1);
print "std: $std1\nbigint: $bigint1\n";
[download]

Just wanted to contribute to the topic as we veered off it :)

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.