Mathematics
Perl can do just about any kind of mathematics you can dream up.
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.)
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.
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 2,000, or determine π to 10,000 digits. See
the Math::BigInt and Math::BigFloat modules.