ulong_value Cell member function not behaving correctly

[Daniel J Sebald]

John,

I've a question for you.  I'm testing a built-in version of dec2base and 
ran into a problem where ulong_value() for a Cell is returning 0 when it 
is defined in octave to be 2^64-1.  That is:

octave_value
dec2base_cell_str_op (const Cell& D, const charMatrix& BASE, int LEN)

[snip]

      // Determine largest number
      long unsigned int dval = D(i).ulong_value ();
fprintf(stderr, "D(i) = %lu\n", dval);
      if (dval > D_max)
        D_max = dval;

The answer is 0.  However, if I use the following, I get the correct result:

      // Determine largest number
      long unsigned int dval = D(i).uint64_scalar_value ();
fprintf(stderr, "D(i) = %lu\n", dval);
      if (dval > D_max)
        D_max = dval;

Is this a known issue, i.e., this pertains to this comment in ov.h:

  // FIXME -- these are kluges.  They turn into doubles
  // internally, which will break for very large values.  We just use
  // them to store things like 64-bit ino_t, etc, and hope that those
  // values are never actually larger than can be represented exactly
  // in a double.

?

Thanks,

Dan