Re^5: Reasons for Using Perl 6

[Laurent_R]

Perl 6 is using the Rat type to represent rational numbers, such as 1/3, 23/7, .564, etc. With such numbers, calculations made with the four basic operators are generally accurate. This is because the Rat type represents rationals with two integers, one for the numerator and one for the denominator.

When using irrational numbers, such as square root of 2, or trigonometric functions, then Perl 6 is forced to use floating-point arithmetic and suffers from the same drawbacks as other programming languages.

So Perl 6 can do simple interest calculations accurately, but for compound interest calculations, it would fall back on floating-point arithmetic (and its flaws) for most common cases (although it is often possible to work around this if needed).

I agree with your point about Perl and speed not being necessarily mutually exclusive. Even though I am dealing with huge volumes of data (so speed is important to me), I have never needed to actually use things such as Inline::C at $work.