You might find the answer to your question in http://perldoc.perl.org/perlnumber.html.

As a reult of how Perl handles numbers, the answer to your question is somewhat complex and dependent on how your perl was compiled. Small integer numbers may be stored internally as integers or floating point numbers with no loss of information, but integers exceeding the limits of the internal integer representation can only be stored as floating point numbers. Floating point numbers have limited precision and for sufficiently large values the difference between one number and the next larger number that can be represented is greater than 1. At this limit, the numbers stop behaving as integers, at least for some operations. This is because, while larger integer values are possible, not all larger integer values are possible. For example, adding 1 to such a large value may not result in any change.

In reply to Re: maximum value of a scalar by ig
in thread maximum value of a scalar by targetsmart

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