On Sun, 16 Jun 2002 12:45:30 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nicholas Clark) wrote:
> For information (which I don't think has reached p5p) the reason for having > messy loops in pp_pow rather than using pow() or log(), exp() and a multiply > is that on Irix with longdoubles, 2**31 was giving a floating point value > slightly *less* than 1<<31, which was really screwing up some tests. > (and by implication (nearly) every perl programmer's assumption that 2**n > is an integer) Perhaps it had the same floating-point engine as my first "scientific" calculator, for which 2**32 was 4294967295 (i.e. one less than the correct answer). Cheers, Philip
