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.
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| B.8. Other Operators and Functions |  | B.10. Lists and Arrays |
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