Provides big-integer support for Perl. Prior to 5.8, and for 32-bit architectures, Perl supported whatever numbers your platform supported. This wasn't always the best solution when dealing with large numbers. Thus, the integer-related math modules were born, including Math::BigInt and bigint. Math::BigInt and bigint override all of the core Perl math functions and still support large integers. As of Perl 5.8, bigint.pm is shipped with the Perl source kit.
For example:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w use bigint; my $num1 = 4; my $num2 = 1024; print $num1 ** $num2, "\n"; # Prints a very large number
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