Division of Powers of Ten is wrong. Why?

[mbauman]

It’s not the division that was “wrong,” it was the exponentiation.

julia> 10^22
1864712049423024128

This is because Julia uses machine integer arithmetic — see:

Julia messes up integer exponents?

Julia uses actual machine integer arithmetic, which means that numbers can and do under- and overflow if you try to perform a computation outside of the range of values that can be represented by such an integer. See Integer overflow - Wikipedia for more general explanation. If you actually need to deal with integers outside the range of a 64-bit Int, then you might want to use Julia’s built-in support for BigInt (which is much closer to the way integers behave in Python): julia> big(10)^19 10…