see my updates in the meantime!

Nota Bene: There are no restrictions of the range operator documented in perlop.

> See "IV".

Actually I'm expecting to work in a high level language which abstracts the implementation details away.

Sure I could analyze the C-sources but thats not why I use Perl.

> grep -l " IV " /usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/*.pod
/usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/perlapi.pod
/usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/perlguts.pod
/usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/perlhack.pod
/usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/perliol.pod
/usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/perlreapi.pod
/usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/perlxs.pod
[download]

UPDATE:

For those interested perlnumber holds some infos... especially:

       In fact numbers stored in the native integer format may be stor
+ed
       either in the signed native form, or in the unsigned native for
+m.  Thus
       the limits for Perl numbers stored as native integers would typ
+ically
       be -2**31..2**32-1, with appropriate modifications in the case 
+of
       64-bit integers.  Again, this does not mean that Perl can do op
+erations
       only over integers in this range: it is possible to store many 
+more
       integers in floating point format.
[download]