Converting integer + mantissa to float

I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around this:

I am writing a script that will receive two integers as input that
represent a single float. The first is the integer part, the second is
hat mantissa. How do I recomine them into a single float? all I'm
coming up with so far is:

my $float = $int_part . '.' . $matissa; #or
my $float = sprintf "%u.%u", $int_part, $mantissa;

It seems, though, like there should be a more elegant way to handle
this than turning two numbers into a string to turn around and use the
result as  number again. What am I missing?

TIA,

-- jay
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