But it still comes down to the definition of floating point. There are fifteen or sixteen decimal digits maximum in Perl's floating point implementation, so stagnation will occur at either the sixteenth or seventeenth significant digit, irrespective of the exponent. Having said that there is a limit to the absolute value of the exponent before Perl cries 'Inf'. Curiously, it will also cry Inf when approaching zero which seems a bit flaky to me, when it could just zero the thing.

Update: Inf as in infinity. Ambiguity being a famous line from an old film, 'Carry on Cleo', where Caesar cries: 'Infamy, infamy, they've all go it in fer me'

One world, one people

In reply to Re^2: Determining the minimum representable increment/decrement possible? by anonymized user 468275
in thread Determining the minimum representable increment/decrement possible? by BrowserUk

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