I feel like 'int' ought to have a stronger contract of doing what's written on the label.

The documentation for int() says that it "Returns the integer portion of EXPR".
It's using "integer" in the mathematical sense of "whole number", not in the programming sense of "IV".
It just so happens that with the most commonly used builds of perl (where IV precision >= NV precision) every EXPR that (in numeric context) contains a fractional portion will also truncate to a value that fits into an IV ... so I can see how the confusion might arise.
But, for example, we don't want int(2 ** 65) to start returning '0' or 'undef' or IV_MAX just because it's too big to fit into an IV.

If you switch to a perl where IV precision < NV precision (such as perls whose IV size is 4 bytes, or whose NV type is __float128), then you'll encounter lots of cases where EXPR contains values with a fractional portion, and yet has an integer portion that's too big to fit into an IV.
On those builds, and for those values of EXPR, int(EXPR) will happily and silently return just the "whole number" portion of EXPR as an NV.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^6: Weird behavior of int() by syphilis
in thread Weird behavior of int() by cLive ;-)

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