So i wrote this program:

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

#Program to calculate the range of unsigned integer numbers
#produced from 1 to 32 bits.

use warnings;
use strict;

for(0..32){
 my $bin='0b'.'1'x$_;
 print "$_ : 0 to ",oct $bin;
}
[download]

and it worked great. But then I tried the C solution provided with KDevelop:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
main ()
   {
   long int i=1,j=i;

                    /* title            */
   puts("Bits\tRange");
   puts("----\t-----");
                    /* O/P data and calc the next
                     * set of values        */
   for (i=1; i<=32; i++)
      {
      printf("%2ld\t0-%12lu\n", i, j*=2);
      }
   }
[download]

but it printed 0-0 as the range for 64 bits. I'm guessing there was a buffer overflow at 64 bits (?). (btw, for the pedantic, the program doesn't work correctly, and you must change j*=2 to (j*=2)-1 for it to).

So i changed the for loop in my script above to:

for(31..64){
[download]

to see if Perl would be so affected. It worked OK! But it produced a slew of error messages claiming:

Binary number > 0b11111111111111111111111111111111 non-portable at ./b
+its line
        11
[download]

So I included a use diagnostics at the top of my code, adn got a helpful error message, explaining everything:

Integer overflow in binary number at ./bits line 12 (#1)
    (W overflow) The hexadecimal, octal or binary number you have spec
+ified
    either as a literal or as an argument to hex() or oct() is too big
+ for
    your architecture, and has been converted to a floating point numb
+er.
    On a 32-bit architecture the largest hexadecimal, octal or binary 
+number
    representable without overflow is 0xFFFFFFFF, 037777777777, or
    0b11111111111111111111111111111111 respectively.  Note that Perl
    transparently promotes all numbers to a floating point representat
+ion
    internally--subject to loss of precision errors in subsequent
    operations.
[download]

And, a bit down the line:

Binary number > 0b11111111111111111111111111111111 non-portable at ./b
+its line
        12 (#2)
    (W portable) The binary number you specified is larger than 2**32-
+1
    (4294967295) and therefore non-portable between systems.  See
    perlport for more on portability concerns.
[download]

That cleared up why the error messages were coming up.