If I am dealing with integers that can get anywhere near the safe limit (which is a lot of the time), I use a bigint library.

Fair enough, but all the OP wanted was to test whether a positive integer value was greater than ~0.
If you think it's fair enough that checking whether $non_negative_integer_value > ~0 should not necessarily be sufficient, then that's fine by me - you've got what you want, and you're welcome to stick with your 64-bit precision IV & 53-bit precision NV perl configuration.

To me, the behaviour (re integer-float conversions) on this and only this IV/NV configuration is interesting and challenging, up to a point. But it's poorly thought out (if it was ever actually thought out at all), and having to deal with it is counter-productive. Perl is supposed to DWIM and to make things easier, and this particular configuration falls down in those 2 regards.
That, nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century this configuration is still arguably the most prevalent by far, makes me wonder about the mental acuity of perl programmers - at least those perl programmers that are interested in perl's math operations.
OTOH, for all other possible IV/NV permutations perl's math behaviour (re integer-float conversions) is sane, helpful, DWIMs, and makes things easier.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^3: Number too big to fit in integer by syphilis
in thread Number too big to fit in integer by jpl

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.