Re: May I be bitten by floating point arithmetic in the following restricted case?

in reply to May I be bitten by floating point arithmetic in the following restricted case?

As you know, a tiny error log($size) / log(2) could lead to a big error in the result. Perl Differences in the underlying C libraries and hardware can result in those tiny differences on other systems even if they don't exist on your own.

I suppose the error coming from floating point arithmetic can bite me only in the case when $size is a power of 2

You also need to check one less than powers of two for errors rounding up.

2⁴⁹ = 562949953421312

$ perl -E'say int( log(562949953421309) / log(2) )'
48

$ perl -E'say int( log(562949953421310) / log(2) )'
49     XXX

$ perl -E'say int( log(562949953421311) / log(2) )'
49     XXX

$ perl -E'say int( log(562949953421312) / log(2) )'
49

$ perl -E'say int( log(562949953421313) / log(2) )'
49
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(Problem found by accident)

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