gawk ¶This chapter introduces some basic concepts relating to
how computers do arithmetic and defines some important terms.
It then proceeds to describe floating-point arithmetic,
which is what awk uses for all its computations, including a
discussion of arbitrary-precision floating-point arithmetic, which is
a feature available only in gawk. It continues on to present
arbitrary-precision integers, and concludes with a description of some
points where gawk and the POSIX standard are not quite in
agreement.
NOTE: Most users of
gawkcan safely skip this chapter. But if you want to do scientific calculations withgawk, this is the place to be.