Course of Raku / Essentials / Numbers

Rational numbers

Rational numbers are a unique feature of Raku. The Rat data type represents such numbers.

Internally, rational numbers are fractions with two integer parts: numerator and denominator. So, you can easily present numbers such as 1/3 without losing precision.

There are a few ways to write down a Rat number in a program in Raku:

my $x = 1/2;
my $y = <2/3>;

Notice that the slash here is a part of the notation. It is not a division operator, so 1/2 does not mean that you divide 1 by 2. In printing, though, rationals are shown as decimal numbers or integers:

say 1/2; # 0.5
say 3/4; # 0.75

The part of the line after the # symbol is a comment and is ignored by the compiler. Such comments will be used in the course to show the output of the program.

Decimal form

It is important to realise that when you write the number in a decimal form, e.g., 0.5, Raku creates a Rat number at that point. It is not an integer, but it is neither a floating-point number (float or double in other languages). It is still a rational number!

Consider the following example:

say 0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3;

If a programming language uses floating-point arithmetics for these calculations, the result will not be equal to 0. The website 0.30000000000000004.com gives an exhaustive list of examples where floating-point arithmethics does not give an expected result.

But Raku prints an exact 0. This happens because it treats the numbers 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 as rational numbers and keeps them as 1/10, 2/10, and 3/10 internally. Run it from the command line to confirm it:

$ raku -e 'say 0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3'
0

Unicode forms

It is also possible to use Unicode characters that represent the fractions, such as ½ or ¼ or ¾. Probably, it’s not always easy to type it with the keyboard, but these fractions are exactly the same values as their ASCII versions spelt as a fraction or as a decimal number:

With some fractions, such as 1/3, you have fewer options, ⅓ or <1/3>, as the decimal form would require an infinite number of digits.

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