I want to generate a bunch of uniformly distributed non-negative integers in a specified range. The guts of my program look like this:

sub main {
    if (@ARGV < 3) {
USAGE:
        print STDERR ("Usage: $0 low high samples [seed]\n");
        exit 1;
    }
    my ($lo, $hi, $samples, $seed) = @ARGV;
    goto USAGE if ($lo > $hi || $samples <= 0);
    $seed = srand() unless (defined($seed));
    srand($seed);

    my $range = $hi - $lo + 1;
    while ($samples-- > 0) {
        printf("%d\n", $lo + int(rand($range)));
    }
}
main();

[download]

And the code works just fine for run-of-the-mill arguments. But I am a bit of a nut about avoiding unwanted surprises. If somebody supplies a high that is too large to fit in an integer, the program may not do what they intend. Here are some snippets from a debugging session on my PC. 

  DB<151> say ~0
18446744073709551615

  DB<152> say "of course" if (~0 > 18446744073709551614)
of course

  DB<153> say "of course" if (18446744073709551616 > ~0)

  DB<154> say 18446744073709551616
1.84467440737096e+19

[download]

I'd like to catch any case where the arguments are too big to fit in an integer. I can, and probably will, do this using Math::BigInt, but this seems like using a pile driver to crack a peanut. I could, in fact, use Math::BigInt throughout, but far downstream, I want to pack the integers into compact BigEndian numbers, so it's better for me to enforce acceptable values as early as possible.

Is there a simpler way to ensure arguments fit in integers?

In reply to Number too big to fit in integer by jpl

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