I have noticed that the largest integer I can safely work with is 9007199254740991 in 32-bit environment. And that's because the numbers are stored in IEEE-754 format internally. Whatever that means. Anyway, my question is if Perl is compiled for a 64-bit machine and supports 64-bit integer operations, does it still store numbers same way internally, or is there something totally different in place for that? Because I would like to know what's the largest integer I can safely work with in a 64-bit environment.

Here is a simple example: 


my $MAXQUAD = 18446744073709551615;   # equals 0xffffffffffffffff

for (my $i = 0; $i <= $MAXQUAD; $i++)
{
  printf("\n %f", $i);
}
exit;

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Please ignore the fact that this will take forever to count from 0 to $MAXQUAD, but would it actually work? ...because in a 32-bit environment, this loop will never end! It will count from 0 to 9007199254740992, and it will not increment beyond that. It will just get stuck at that number.

In reply to Largest integer in 64-bit perl by harangzsolt33

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