Years ago, while assisting a client with a Perl program, the client demonstrated a function that he was very proud of. The purpose of this function was to overcome the limitations of Perl and allow for larger floating point numbers. The code itself was a few hundred lines long, took weeks of work, and was still a bit buggy.
In one of those "good news, bad news" situations, I introduced the client to the Math::BigFloat module, a module that would have solved the client’s problem in minutes, not weeks, providing a solution that didn’t contain ...
