An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

I don't think of 0.1 as "requesting" any kind of numeric type. It's just a real number.

In Perl 6 that literal does happen to create a Rat value. But that sounds reasonable to me -- all decimal real numbers *are* rational. 0.1 and <1/10> are just two different textual representations for the same value.

So what if you really want to "request" a floating-point value for some reason? Easy: simply use that Rat as a floating-point value. You could assign it to a Num scalar, or you could use it with some operator or method that only works with Nums. It's easy enough to do the conversion. It is, after all, exactly the same conversion most other programming languages do when they interpret the decimal form in the first place.

To be honest, I would not be surprised if Perl implementations skip the Rat value completely if the decimal literal is used somewhere where it will be immediately used as a floating-point value. If the Rat temporary value isn't externally visible, constant-folding can turn it into a constant Num instead.